My Mistake!

February 16, 2009 Blog

I owe readers of my Valentine's Day blog an apology. I claimed that a stack of $1000 bills totaling a trillion Dollars would be over 60 miles high.

I received an email from a reader who shared my information with others. They didn't believe him, so he did the math and found my mistake. He wrote, "I calculated it and here is what I find; 333’ of $1,000 bills make a billion. 1,000 X 333’ comes to 333,000’. Divide that by 5820’ (feet in a mile) and a trillion dollars would stack to 57.216494 miles.

I apologize for the $50 billion exaggeration!

I also neglected to mention that the federal government had already committed around 6 trillion in loans, investments and guarantees to ailing banks and corporations during 2008. That stack of $1000 bills was already over 300 miles high when Obama took office.

President Obama promised change and preached hope during his campaign. In less than a month, another trillion was added to the above amount. According to the following graph in the Washington Post, the total is now at least 7.8 trillion Dollars.

I was speaking at a university all last week and asked nearly everyone I met how many zeros there are in a trillion. No one knew. Yesterday, someone actually knew the answer, and he works for the government! When I asked how high a trillion Dollar stack of $1000 bills would be, he guessed 700 feet.

If you find any mistakes in the chart, tell the Washington Post.