Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Many years ago, the City of Troy installed a new water tank that contained an almost unbelievable number of gallons of drinking water.

In an effort to illustrate the massive amount of water, my friend and colleague at The Troy Progress did the math on the distance that gallon jugs filled with water would have to be lined side by side to equal that amount of water.

According to Frannie, ALL the WAY from 409 South Brundidge Street to the True Value Hardware that was then located at what is now Troy Cable.  “All that way!” Frannie wrote.

Phones started to ring. Not so, the people said.

Actually, the side-by-side gallon jugs of water would stretch from South Brundidge Street in Troy, Alabama to “Atlanta, Georgia!!!!”

With that faux pas in mind, the answer to the question, “How much is a trillion?” was derived from a super-charged mathematician, a mechanical brain and Mr. Google himself.

So, just how much is a trillion?

Here’s the answer:

On March 27, 2020, President Donald Trump signed a $2 trillion coronavirus relief bill as a way for the United States to try to prevent economic devastation.

That raised the question among United States citizens as to just how much is a trillion?

Now, as more dollars are being tossed into relief coffers, the question is once again dominating conversations from the ‘Redwood Forests to the Gulf Stream Waters,” just how much is a trillion?

Well, it’s a million million.

A trillion dollars is a million dollars multiplied by a million. Or if you prefer, a thousand billion. It has an eye-crossing 12 zeroes: 1,000,000,000,000.

In the US, where the average annual income is around $50,000, saving a trillion bucks (with no outgoings) would take 20,000,000 years.

One million dollars spent a day would take 2,800 years to spend $1 trillion.

Or, if you spent one dollar every second around the clock, it would take you 312,688 years to spend a trillion dollars. Spending $1 million an hour, non-stop for 24 hours a day, you wouldn’t run out of $1 trillion for 411 years.

One trillion dollars in $100 dollar bills is 40,000,000 inches high, which is 631 miles.

The United States’ debt to China, as of December 2019, was $1.07 trillion. So, that’s the debt we are leaving our …how many great grandchildren would that be? That’s one for ancestry.

But, that’s just the numbers on one trillion dollars. The coronavirus bill carried a 2 trillion price tag that has now escalated to nearly 3 trillion dollars.

Go Google the numbers on that.