How Much Is A Billion? A Trillion?

Politicians -- at the state and federal level -- talk in numbers that most folks can't visualize. For sure the enormous sums that Congress and the President just committed us to for the Wall Street bailout are beyond our imagination.

These guides -- how much is a billion and how much is a trillion -- are designed to help put these numbers into context. Here are two examples:

• If we wanted to pay down a billion dollars of the US debt, paying one dollar a second, it would take 31 years, 259 days, 1 hour, 46 minutes, and 40 seconds. To pay off a trillion dollars of debt, at a dollar a second, would take about 32,000 years.
• A tightly-packed stack of new $100 bills totaling $1 million would be about 4 feet high. A billion dollars, 4,000 feet high or equivalent to about three Sears Towers stacked on top of one another. That means a stack of $100 bills totaling $1 trillion would be 789 miles or 144 Mt. Everests stacked on top of one another.