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What does one trillion dollars look like?

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Re: What does one trillion dollars look like?

#31

Post by protomyth »

startupfounder wrote: post #3

$6.6 billion in cash was "lost"[0] and then found[1] in Iraq which I can now visualize as 66 pallets of cold hard cash. How do you lose that? [0] http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2011/06/13/exp.tsr... [1] http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2011/10/26/once-thought-lost-a... [Edit] There is $1.18 Trillion in circulation in the USA, about as much as in the last image: http://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_1277…

I know a railroad "lost" a car full of soybeans. It was pre-9/11 and when they finally figured out where they put it(1), the cargo wasn't "fresh".

1) to be fair, the RR company didn't find the car, a worker from the company that was shipping the soybeans spotted it on his way to work and called them.

Re: What does one trillion dollars look like?

#34

Post by [deleted] »

jessriedel wrote: post #13

To me, it's much more constructive to visualize what a huge amount of money can buy, not the money itself. (One of the other commenters is right that it only makes sense to divide a trillion dollar debt over 300 million people. But I think numbers in the millions or even a billion should be visual because projects of this size are local , and so are not split over every American.) $1 million is roughly how much a med…

[deleted]

Re: What does one trillion dollars look like?

#36

Post by thrownaway2424 »

jessriedel wrote: post #13

To me, it's much more constructive to visualize what a huge amount of money can buy, not the money itself. (One of the other commenters is right that it only makes sense to divide a trillion dollar debt over 300 million people. But I think numbers in the millions or even a billion should be visual because projects of this size are local , and so are not split over every American.) $1 million is roughly how much a med…

What could you do with a trillion bucks? You could build 20000 miles of high-speed railways. You could purchase, outright, more than 90% of Canada.

I used to think about this a lot when the cost of Bush the Lesser's war was passing a trillion dollars. It eventually ended up costing almost 2 trillion.

Re: What does one trillion dollars look like?

#37

Post by jgreen10 »

crgt wrote: post #29
rogerbinns wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... per American taxpayer Isn't everyone a taxpayer? Or did you only mean "federal taxpayer"? Even then anyone who has a phone is paying federal taxes on the service. And people pay tax on consumption (sales and service taxes), city, county and state taxes, fuel, and the list goes on. I suspect that the vast majority pay taxes several times a month rather than the 1 in 4 you imply!

My daughter doesn't pay taxes. She doesn't earn any money. She's 6.

I had never really thought about that, but most countries have some form of federal VAT, so you pay your first taxes when you buy your first ice cream, but American kids don't pay federal taxes until they have a job, which is way less fun than eating an ice cream. Maybe that's why Americans hate federal taxes so much.

Re: What does one trillion dollars look like?

#38

Post by Zakharov »

CarlosT wrote: post #10
curtis wrote: post #7

One problem with these kinds of visualizations is that they're often used to visualize things like the U.S. federal budget or, especially, the federal debt. The problem is that to tell those stories accurately, the visualization of trillions of dollars should be accompanied by a visualization of 300 million people.

Exactly. Since 50% of high growth companies are funded with less than $50,000, $1 trillion would fund the start of 20M young high growth companies. Fairly certain at least one of those, 20M, would have solved the financial crisis. In other related news, as of a couple of years ago, my town has a beautiful new landscaped highway median, welcoming you as you enter the city. Source: http://www.inc.com/magazine/201209/in…

You'll run out of founders long before you run out of money.

Re: What does one trillion dollars look like?

#39

Post by mistere »

crgt wrote: post #29
rogerbinns wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... per American taxpayer Isn't everyone a taxpayer? Or did you only mean "federal taxpayer"? Even then anyone who has a phone is paying federal taxes on the service. And people pay tax on consumption (sales and service taxes), city, county and state taxes, fuel, and the list goes on. I suspect that the vast majority pay taxes several times a month rather than the 1 in 4 you imply!

My daughter doesn't pay taxes. She doesn't earn any money. She's 6.

Bad news: if she's a US citizen then at age 6 she already owes about $215,000. As a US citizen she will pay taxes. She'll start out by paying for part of your debt (and your parent's debt.) Then, she'll pay for her own debt.

I've apologized to my daughter (now 24 years old) for the burden. It's unconscionable but it's the will of the majority so I have no choice.

Re: What does one trillion dollars look like?

#40

Post by rogerbinns »

jgreen10 wrote: post #37
crgt wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My daughter doesn't pay taxes. She doesn't earn any money. She's 6.

I had never really thought about that, but most countries have some form of federal VAT, so you pay your first taxes when you buy your first ice cream, but American kids don't pay federal taxes until they have a job, which is way less fun than eating an ice cream. Maybe that's why Americans hate federal taxes so much.

The US doesn't have a federal VAT style tax although there may be some shenanigans with imports. However most (but not all) states have sales taxes. Its actually worse than that - depending on where a sale happens it can be a combination of state, county and city taxes! For example in California here are the rates for purchases made in cities beginning with H (randomly picked letter) http://www.boe.ca.gov/cgi-bin/rates.cgi?LETTER=H&LIST=CI...

As is usual in the land of the free, there is corporate welfare going on and car purchases are taxed based on where the consumer lives not where the purchase is made as for all other purchases.

Here is the California sales tax FAQ http://www.boe.ca.gov/sutax/faqpurch.htm - note how section 8 says barter is covered so possibly a kid swapping stuff may be covered.

Here is the list of exemptions (PDF) http://www.boe.ca.gov/pdf/pub61.pdf but that is only at a California level (my city charges a tax for utility usage of phone, gas and electricity).

I'm a foreigner living in the US and cheating on taxes seems very pervasive here. I don't know anyone who reported their Amazon purchases even though they needed to. The resentment mainly seems to be because they think others are doing a better job at finding loopholes and undetected cheats, with consequent resentment being a "sucker" for paying more as a consequence.

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