Gone are the days of talking about money in terms of billions of dollars; now it's all about the trillions. But what exactly does that look like in bill form? It's hard to fathom a million, let alone a trillion.
A new video from Buzzfeed breaks it all down and very quickly things get out of hand.
Just seeing the scale of it all is sobering, as the $100 million stacks made up of $100 bills continues to grow and grow, until the cartoon man used for scale can barely be seen amidst the piles of money.
But if you think that's insane, the idea that lining up a trillion $1 bills end-to-end could reach the sun puts just how much money we are talking about in perspective. That's 96,906,565 miles worth of dollar bills. That can buy you quite a few McDonald's cheeseburgers.
And that's just $1 trillion. The U.S. debt is currently $18 trillion. If you stacked the U.S. debt in a pile, it would be taller than the largest building in the United States, One World Trade Center. If the debt were to be divided evenly between each U.S. citizen (please no), all 320 million people living in the country would have to fork over $56,250. Ouch.
So there you have it. None of us will likely ever see a giant pile of a million, billion, or trillion dollars in cold-hard cash, but if we ever did, it would probably end up looking something like this:
Perhaps it's for the best.
