A trillion dollars might not be what it used to be, what with Presidentish Joe Biden spending that much and more on pet projects designed to accomplish little except enrich his favorite interest groups. But it’s still more money than a single person has ever been worth, and it’s even a few times more than even the largest corporation has ever held in cash or other liquid assets. Apple’s outstanding shares might be worth about three trillion dollars, but the company has “only” $207 billion cash on hand.
Elon Musk is the world’s richest man on most days, but you’d still need nearly six of him to rack up a trillion bucks. But even if someday Starlink and SpaceX IPOs made Musk the world’s first trillionaire — something not outside the realm of possibility — Musk would never in a hundred years ever see anything like a trillion dollars in cash.
Still, if you had a trillion dollars — to paraphrase Barenaked Ladies — what do you think you could buy?
If you were thinking of going big on the stock market, you could buy a third of Apple, half of oil giant Saudi Aramco, or all of Tesla — and still have about $200 billion left to stuff under a comically large mattress. You could buy the Visa credit card company twice.
For those who are a little more security-minded, a trillion dollars deposited in a three-year certificate of deposit at the current rate of 1.30 percent would earn you a nifty $13 billion or so each year. At the end of the third year, you’d have earned enough to buy three of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and still have your original trillion in the bank.
On second thought, skip that last thought. Sure, you could buy three Jerry Jones, but where would you keep him?
Anyway, at $30 dollars an hour, eight hours a day, you could hire a maid to clean your house for the next 11.4 million years. You could buy every single Powerball combination at $2 bucks a ticket 1,711 times — not that you’d want to unless you’re criminally bad with money. Even if we tried to get more realistic and limit your spending to a million dollars a day, you’d still need almost 3,000 years to spend it all.
If these examples seem ridiculous, it’s because there’s not really anything anyone could ever want to buy for [DR-EVIL-VOICE] ONE TRILLION DOLLARS [/DR-EVIL-VOICE].
As I’m sure you’re probably aware, it takes a government — a huge, bloated, out-of-control government — to spend a trillion dollars on any one thing. This year’s record-smashing $6.3 trillion federal budget doesn’t even spend a measly trillion of it on national defense. Individually, neither Medicare, nor Medicaid, nor student loan programs, nor income security spending comes up to a trillion dollars.
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To get to that kind of money, you have to go to Social Security, which will cost $1.2 trillion in 2023. But Social Security sends checks out to millions and millions of people — who will spend it on everything from food to rent to medicine.
So not even a government run by spend-happy politicians with all the restraint of Hunter Biden perusing the downtown Hookers & Blow Buffet can spend a trillion dollars to buy any single thing, right?
BZZZZT.
Wrong answer, try again.
Washington will spend a trillion dollars this year, or very nearly that much, on just one thing — but you’ll never believe what it is.
Nothing.
Literally nothing.
According to Disclose.TV, the interest Washington pays on our outstanding debt will come up to nearly a trillion dollars. A trillion dollars that won’t result in a single Social Security check, not a dime for Medicare, no stealth fighters, no nothing. We’re spending almost a trillion dollars to service the debt, and we didn’t even get to keep our AAA credit rating.
The national vig exploded by more than 50% this year, thanks to just three things. First, there was Donald Trump’s $4 trillion in “stimulus” to cover the unneeded lockdowns. Then there were trillions more in funny money spent since by Biden and the Democrats during 2021-2022 — and they permanently jacked up spending, I should add, and not just one-time stimulus checks. So the third thing is that the Fed had to jack up interest rates to try and choke off the inflation resulting from all that spending.
If you’re carrying any credit card debt, you know how painful those interest rate hikes were to your monthly Visa or Mastercard payment. Well, Uncle Sugar has put more than $32 trillion on the national Amex, and the annual interest charges are now enough to buy all those silly things I already told you about.
Instead, we got nothing.
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