When the TV drama "The Six Million Dollar Man" debuted in 1974, it seemed impossible that $6 million could be spent on R&D to make Major Steve Austin "better than he was before". My parents had just bought a house in a nice part of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia for $42,000. A call at pay phone cost a dime. Gas was 75¢ a gallon (about 20¢ a litre). Winning the Atlantic Lotto had a grand prize of $250,000.
A million of anything was an abstract number. It was a lot. Two million was twice a lot.
By the late 1980's, millions had become common, and better understood. A million dollars made you very well-off, but not rich. It was a decent sized account for an advertising agency.
A billion? That was the new abstract number. A thousand million. Budget surpluses and deficits of nations were measured in billions. But certainly not the profits and losses of most private companies. Walmart's sales in 1987? $15.9 billion (it will be well over $400 billion for 2008 - almost half a trillion dollars).
In the recent financial turmoil, for the first time in history we're talking in terms of trillions of dollars. Citigroup's bailout is around $300 billion. The US aid package already announced is $700 billion, and another round is on the way.
What is a trillion dollars? A thousand thousand million dollars. What does that look like, anyway?
If you spent $360,000 an hour ($1,000 a second), it would take you almost 32 years to spend a trillion dollars.
A $1 trillion stack of $100 bills would be 789 miles high.
A trillion dollars divided up amongst Canadians would amount to over $30,000 for every man, woman, child and baby.
To me, the only difference between a billion and a trillion? The letter "T".
