Federal Government Spending & Annual Revenue
Most people who work for a living go to work, pay their taxes, and give little thought to where their tax money is going, or if it is being spent wisely.
I think the majority of workers would not argue against the statement that there is a great deal of waste and mismanagement of our tax dollars, with corruption raising its ugly head more often than not.
To give you an idea of the size of Government Spending and Tax Revenue, take a look at the chart below.
Common sense tells us the above numbers are big, but do we really understand how big these numbers are?
The trick to thinking about large numbers is to relate them to something meaningful.
How big is a trillion? Unless we’ve thought of some concrete ways to picture this number about a billion, all that we can say is, “A billion is big and a trillion is even bigger.”
Millions
First, consider a million:
- One million is a thousand thousand.
- One million is a 1 with six zeros after it, denoted by 1,000,000.
- One million seconds is about 11 and a half days.
- One million pennies stacked on top of each other would make a tower nearly a mile high.
- If you earn $45,000 a year, it would take 22 years to amass a fortune of 1 million dollars.
- One million ants would weigh a little over 6 pounds.
- One million dollars divided evenly among the U.S. population would mean everyone in the United States would receive about one-third of one cent.
Billions
Next up is one billion:
- One billion is a thousand million.
- One billion is a 1 with nine zeros after it, denoted by 1,000,000,000.
- One billion seconds is about 32 years.
- One billion pennies stacked on top of each other would make a tower almost 870 miles high.
- If you earn $45,000 a year, it would take 22,000 years to amass a fortune of one billion dollars.
- One billion ants would weigh over 3 tons, a little less than the weight of an elephant.
- One billion dollars divided equally among the U.S. population would mean that everyone in the United States would receive about $3.33.
Trillions
After this is a trillion:
- One trillion is a thousand billion, or equivalently a million million.
- It is a 1 with 12 zeros after it, denoted by 1,000,000,000,000.
- One trillion seconds is 32,000 years.
- One trillion pennies stacked on top of each other would make a tower about 870,000 miles high, the same distance obtained by going to the moon, back to Earth, and then to the moon again.
- One trillion ants would weigh over 3,000 tons.
- One trillion dollars divided evenly among the U.S. population would mean that everyone in the United States would receive a little over $3,000.
Perhaps a visualization will be a little easier to comprehend.
We supposedly have a two-party system, with the Democrats on the Left of center, and moving farther to the left rapidly, and Republicans on the Right of center, and moving closer to Democrats with their actions more often than not. Consequently, the two are commonly referred to as “The Uni-Party.
Sometimes members of Congress are caught in illegal activities, but I believe they represent just the tip of the iceberg. With so much money being moved around, there is no way for the average citizen to ever know what is going on below the surface.
