09/06/2012
$1 trillion = $1,000 billion or $1,000,000,000,000 (that's 12 zeros)
How hard is it to spend a trillion dollars? If you spent one dollar every second, you would have spent a million dollars in 12 days. At that same rate, it would take you 32 years to spend a billion dollars. But it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend a trillion dollars.
And now, some scary facts about the debt and the deficit -- some basics:
Deficit = money government takes in -- money government spends
2012 US deficit = $1.33 trillion
2013 Proposed budget deficit = $901 billion
National debt = Total amount borrowed over time to fund the annual deficit
Current national debt = $15.3 trillion (or $49,030 per every man, woman and child in the US or $135,773 per taxpayer)
