Take a Break

Millions, Billions, Trillions: Just how much money is it?

The recent stimulus law provided about $800 billion dollars in an effort to get the U.S. economy back on track. The proposed 2010 federal budget hit the $3.5 trillion mark.

Just how much money is that? Most people have a hard time envisioning such astronomical amounts. Here's a visual that might help.

$1,000,000 - If you laid one million one-dollar bills end-to-end, you would have a path 95 miles long.

$1,000,000,000 - A billion one-dollar bills laid end-to-end would go around the earth almost four times. (The earth is about 25,000 miles around.)

$1,000,000,000,000 - A trillion one-dollar bills laid end-to-end would go around the earth 3,800 times. So a $3.5 trillion federal budget would wrap the world 13,000 times in one-dollar bills. And that, fellow taxpayers, is a lot of money.