Keeping amounts of money in perspective

These days, it’s amazing how we can get lost when we hear “billions” and “trillions” of dollars. How can we relate to the enormity of these numbers? It’s actually very difficult to visually appreciate the order of magnitude of our own country GDP, versus its budget deficit (did I hear surplus?) or certain very high revenues? Two days ago as I was attending a very good seminar put together and presented by Myles Rademan - our city public affair specialist - I heard about an excellent approach to illustrating that concept in a way we can all better relate to. It basically compares any amount of money with time. That one is easy because from zero to one-hundred year we roughly have a human life span. Now the comparison goes something like this:
$1 = 1 second
$3,600 = 1 hour
$86,400 = 1 day
$31,536,000 = 1 year
$ 1 Billion = 31 year
$ 1 Trillion = 31,000 years
The following table illustrates the system (all figures shown are from our very own CIA and are fairly current – they were collected between 2007 and 2008.)