What Comes After a Trillion?

After the $800 billion bailout and the nearly $1 trillion stimulus bill and a pending $400+ billion omnibus bill and a $600+ billion health care bill, we need to adjust our nomenclature and frame of reference. A thousand more trillion dollar bills and we'll be at...uh... What comes after a trillion?

Thanks to this helpful chart, a quadrillion comes after a trillion. So everybody get ready for that.

But in the meantime, here's a page that provides some context into exactly what a trillion is. There's also a good article in The Politico today on the same topic. It quotes David M. Schwartz, author of  the children's book (handy for Members of Congress, too!) "How Much Is a Million?"

"Each step from million to billion to trillion is times a thousand. If you think of it in terms of time -- seconds -- and go to a point a million seconds from that, you'll have gone 11½ days into the future. A billion seconds turns out to be 32 years. You'll reach that in 2041. A trillion seconds is 32,000 years. I like to say that I have a pretty good idea of what I'll be doing a million seconds from now, I have no idea what I'll be doing a billion seconds from now, and I have an excellent idea what I'll be doing a trillion seconds from now."

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has this take:

 "If you started the day Jesus Christ was born and spent $1 million every day since then, you still wouldn't have spent $1 trillion."

Think of it this way: If we had a quadrillion taxpayers, these coupla trillion would be no big deal.