How much is a trillion dollars?

Written by Joe Pitts on November 16, 2009, 10:11 PM

The Congressional Budget Office says the House-passed version of "health reform" (it's not reform, just another entitlement we can't pay for) will cost a little over $1 trillion.  If you add the expensive provisions Speaker Pelosi is trying to hide by passing them seperately, CBO says the cost is about $1.3 trillion.  The Heritage Foundation says $1.5 trillion.  So just how much is a trillion?

• A trillion is a thousand times a billion.
• A trillion is ten times the number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.
• It takes 12 years for a million seconds to pass.  It takes almost 32,000 years for a trillion seconds to pass.
• A trillion is just over half the size of this year's federal deficit, if the entire Obama legislative program is passed into law.

We already have a multi-trillion-dollar deficit because we can't afford the programs we have now.  A new trillion-dollar program is something America just can't afford.