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Monday, April 27, 2009

How much is a trillion dollars?

US senators battling a nearly one-trillion-dollar economic stimulus package are striving to find vivid ways to explain just how big that one with 12 zeroes after it really is.

On Tuesday, Republican Senator John Thune said you could ring the equator 38.9 times with 100-dollar bills stretched side-by-side -- and showed a picture of Earth encircled in greenbacks to underline his point.

"One trillion dollars is a terrible thing to waste," he said. "We shouldn't spend money we don't have on things we don't need."

A day earlier, Senate Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell also grappled with ways to illustrate how big the 888-billion-dollar stimulus plan -- which could easily expand before a final vote -- really is.

"Just to put a trillion dollars in context, if you started spending the day that Jesus was born and you spend a million dollars every single day, you still wouldn't have spent a trillion dollars. This is a lot of money," he said.

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