What does one trillion dollars look like?

Pffft! They're aiming low. I have one hundred and fifty trillion dollars[1] sitting right here on my desk. A 100 trillion dollar bill and a 50 trillion dollar bill :) [1] Admitedly its out-of-circulation zimbabwe dollars that would be worth maybe $5 if it were still in circulation. Heres what one hundred trillion dollars looks like: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3e/Zimbabwe_%2410...

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 median-wage American…

One of the things contributing to our continued economic illiteracy is our insistence on stupid abstractions like this. When you distribute huge sums of money it doesn't actually wind up being all that much in individual terms. "hose the rich, they can afford it!" yeah, but after you hose the rich (and they start leaving/not investing) you only have like...a grand per person. A trillion dollars is less than 3 grand per person in the US. Say we hosed the…