Size of a Trillion/ Reverse Outsourcing (Onshoring)

Letter to the Editor of Herald-Times, Bloomington, IN (publ. in Oct. 25, 2008 issue)

To the Editor,

Mike Leonard's report on the immensity of the quantity "one trillion" has inspired me to contribute to the subject. By my figuring, a stack of a million one dollar bills is 250 feet high, and a billion is 47.3 miles high, and a trillion is 47,300 miles high.

Today's national debt of $10 trillion would stack all the way from the earth to the moon and back again; and if stacked horizontally it would circle the earth 19 times. For $10 trillion, you or the Chinese could buy our entire 50 states at $4,203.00 per acre.

A radio signal or photon traveling at the speed of light would take 13.5 seconds to traverse the stacked $53 trillion of our "unfinanced" national debt.

Back on Earth, I'd like to suggest a way for our Mayor Kruzan to put himself and Bloomington in the spotlight, by being the first city to offer extraordinary economic incentives that exclusively target American companies abroad, to get them to move back to the U.S., to Bloomington, Ind.

Lee Nading
Bloomington, IN
nadingart@lycos.com