What is a Trillion and its Relationship with the US National Debt?

What is a trillion and its relationship with the US national debt

We will answer the following questions:
What is one trillion?
What does one trillion dollars look like?
How does one trillion relate to the US national debt?

One trillion means the number one followed by twelve zeroes.
One trillion seconds equals 31,546 years. If we went back in history 1 trillion seconds we would be walking with cave people!

Consider a football field from goal post to go post, filled with $100 bills stacked to a little over seven feet high; that is just under 1 trillion dollars.

Let's take a moment and examined the US national debt. In 1837, at the end of Andrew Jackson's administration, the national debt was $336,000.
A stack of $100 bills for $336,000 would be about 1½ inches high.

Over the next 144 years, the national debt continued to slowly accumulate.
By 1981, at the beginning of Ronald Reagan's administration, the national debt was just under $1 trillion.
Since then, the debt continued to rapidly increase. A yellow line was added at each $5 trillion level to help to separate the mounting debt.

On January 20th, 2021, the day president Biden took office, the US national debt was just over $27 trillion. Within weeks of his inauguration, the national debt grew to over $28 trillion.

An interesting Internet site is the U.S. debt clock, at USDebtClock.org.

As of April 7th, 2021, it DOES NOT include the $1.9 trillion Coronavirus Stimulus Bill.

In the upper left is the US national debt, a little over $28 trillion.

Skip over the box to the right, to the debt per taxpayer box. That $224,455 is the debt each US taxpayer is responsible for.

You may notice most of the information is rapidly changing.

This real time clock contains a plethora of information well worth investigating.

In early March, 2021, the US House of Representatives and the US Senate, passed HR 1319, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Act, also known as, the Coronavirus Stimulus Bill.

Bringing the national debt to over $30 trillion.

On the horizon is the climate and infrastructure bill which would add an additional 2.2 trillion dollars to the US national debt, reaching a new height of over $32 trillion.

In the first year of the Biden administration, the national debt will have grown over five trillion dollars, more than any other U.S. president incurred during their entire term in office.

One may ask where the money will come from to pay for the increasing national debt.

We covered a lot of information today.

This concludes our “what is a trillion and its relationship with the US national debt” lesson.
Until next time, make it a goal to learn something new every day.

SOURCES:
■ https://usdebtclock.org/
■ https://www.self.inc/info/us-debt-by-president/
■ https://www.youtube.com/user/whitehouse
■ https://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/calculations.html
■ https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/Numbers/Math/Mathematical_Thinking/how_big_is_a_trillion.htm
■ https://www.rapidtables.com/calc/time/seconds-in-year.html
■ https://conquerordesigns.com