What is $1 trillion?

Dear Editor,

What is and how much is $1 trillion?

Say I began a large ranching operation at the time of the birth of Christ (Year 0) and due to inept management I managed to lose one $1 million a day until yesterday. For the purposes of discussion and we will forget Leap Years or that old Roman emperor's manipulation of the calendar, at that rate of daily loss of my money it would take approximately 732 more years from now of such daily losses for me to lose $1 trillion.

It might be interesting to see how long it is going to take me to pay off this loss. If it takes approximately 2,740 years to lose a trillion dollars at a loss rate of a million dollars per day, how about if I pay off the principle (Forget the interest for the purpose of discussion) at a rate of $10 million per day. It looks like I am gonna have to punch an awful lot of cows for about 274 more years. In the event that I find that I must pass this debt on to my descendants, it would appear that I am not talking great-grandkids, but several more generations beyond them.

I understand our government is considering a new annual deficit spending of about $2 trillion. This is on top of the $ 4.3 trillion deficit coming due that we already have on the books. Then there is the $45 trillion of unfunded Social Security and Medicare costs facing us in about 15 years. (Remember that ole "lock box" we were told about? Well, Congress long ago jimmied the lock. It ain't there.) I wonder how much money we have in the U.S. bank. Our Gross National Product is what we have in the bank. This is the dollars we get from asset production, interest income, etc. In our terms, this is our income, salary or whatever. Our government prints dollar bills and bonds, backed by what we have in the bank. If we print twice as many dollar bills and/or bonds as we have dollars in the bank, each dollar is really only worth 50 cents. This is not good for our credit rating. As of now our government is financing our deficit spending by selling U.S. Bonds to China, Japan, the Middle East oil rich nations, etc. If our credit rating begins to look too bad, they will no longer buy our bonds and then our nation will he in deep do-do to finance our deficit operations.

We are entering an economic depression, therefore our GNP will decrease. If our deficit spending does not also decrease we will eventually lose the ranch. When the ranch has to sell off some cows to pay taxes -- the lower the taxes the fewer cows that will have to be sold off and the more cows that will remain to be sold at a profit. (And the more taxes on their sales will be paid.)

If the government gives the unemployed cowboy $500 just because he looks so cool sitting on his horse, this does not produce any cows. What he buys with this "found" money will quite likely be produced in China, and will add little or nothing to our GNP. However the national bank is still out the $500

Richard Coffman

Miles City, Mont.