How Much is a Trillion?

I can't even begin to fathom how much a trillion dollars is. And the U.S. government is in debt trillions (with an S!) of dollars. How did that happen? Why would the people in charge keep borrowing money just because we hadn't hit the ceiling of debt yet? And who has a ceiling of debt in the trillions of dollars anyway? And then, what is done when we crash into that ceiling? We raise the ceiling, of course. Insanity!

I recently got an email from my professional organization telling me about a new $500 million state-level grant competition. Each state can apply for a $60 million grant to fund early childhood education for kids in poverty, cradle-Kindergarten. That may be a worthy project (or maybe not), but in either case, we have a national debt to pay. $500 million dollars may be a drop in the bucket that can hold trillions of dollars, but we have got to start putting drops in that bucket in order to get the debt paid off, not find new ways to spend money we don't have.

This is wrong on so many levels.

The truth really is stranger than fiction. What do you think?

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