$1Trillion Dollars Spent

Spelling out the dollar amount just doesn’t have the same effect as writing the number out.

$1,000,000,000,000

A one with twelve zero’s behind. More money than my family, my family’s family’s family will ever see. Unless my daughter hits it big with the next great whatchamcallit online business idea my only chance of ever being part of this kind of dollar figure is limited to the fact I pay taxes. Since my taxes and your taxes are all part of the estimated $1 Trillion spent in Iraq so far, it was interesting to see exactly how that stacks up against all the other Government spending.

And since the annual budgets of the National Science Foundation and the National Cancer Institute are $6 billion and $5 billion, respectively, the $1 trillion war cost is equivalent to 170 NSFs and 200 NCIs. No doubt a couple of those NSFs could have been used to develop cheap hybrid cars and alternative fuels. Scientific progress is by its nature unpredictable, but some extra NCIs might also have lead to breakthroughs in cancer treatment.

The above quote is taken from this ABC News: Who’s Counting: How Iraq Trillion Could Have Been Spent.

Here is another great way to picture who large this number is;

Another time analogy is illuminating. A million seconds takes approximately 11.5 days to tick by, whereas a billion seconds requires about 32 years. Fully 32,000 years need to pass before a trillion seconds elapse.

Worth a read, enjoy it, we paid for it.

Note: I have no place nor do I want to comment on the human costs of war. Words and numbers from me are insignificant, you can not put a price tag on life and humanity.