"Sec. 6. Maximum Amount of Authorized Purchases.
The Secretary's authority to purchase mortgage-related assets under this Act shall be limited to $700,000,000,000 outstanding at any one time"
U.S. Treasury Proposal to Buy Mortgage-Related Assets: Text
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The United States Government is capitalizing on a comprehensional failure of the human mind – the inability to fully grasp the magnitude of large numbers. Upon hearing numbers beyond a few thousand, say ‘three billion, nine hundred eighty seven million, six hundred forty-two thousand, nine hundred fifty seven dollars and sixty-seven cents’ and our brains interpret it as, “Wow, that’s a big number” with no true handle on exactly how big. Therefore, I feel it is time to give the minds of the American public a real grasp on large numbers.
According to the United States treasury, a One Dollar Bill has a thickness of 0.0043 inches – top to bottom, less than five thousandths of an inch. One thousand One Dollar Bills would be one thousand times thicker. Therefore, $1000.00 would be 4.3 inches thick, or the diagonal screen measurement of many popular navigation devices.
Taking this analogy to the next logical step would be to move from one thousand dollars to one million dollars. One million is one thousand thousands, so the thickness of $1,000,000 is a thousand times thicker than the stack of $1000.00 – or 4300 inches. Convert this number to feet (divide by 12) and this becomes 358.3 feet. A football field is 360 feet, so one million dollars in One Dollar Bills stacked one on top of the other would be 1 foot 9 inches shy of an entire football field, and yes, that includes the end zones.
One billion -- $1,000,000,000 would again be one thousand times thicker than one million, or 358,333.3 feet, a little more than 995 football fields with their end zones. In miles (divide the number of feet by 5280) this is 67.866 miles – the approximate driving distance from New York, New York to Milford, Connecticut. That is a stack of One Dollar Bills that is nearly 70 miles high, and this analogy has only gone to one billion dollars.
One Trillion is one thousand billions. Numerically this is 67.866 miles times 1000 – one trillion One Dollar Bills stacked one on top of another is 67,866 miles. The circumference of the earth at the equator is 24,901.55 miles. A one trillion dollar stack of One Dollar Bills would circumnavigate the globe, at the equator, 2.73 times. 2 ¾ times. Around the globe. And that is just ONE trillion dollars.
Our current national debt cap is 10.6 trillion dollars. A stack of One Dollar Bills that totaled 10.6 trillion dollars would go around the equator 28.93 times. 28.93 times. 720,601 miles of One Dollar Bills. That is our CURRENT cap. The proposed cap would be 11.3 trillion dollars. A stack of One Dollar Bills that travels around the equator 30.85 times. This is what is being proposed. Can we as a nation afford to make our debt the equivalent of a stack of One Dollar Bills that would stretch 31 times around the planet?
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