If a long time ago we knew this was coming and we wanted to plan ahead and save a little bit every day – say a penny a day – we would have had to start over 2.2 million years ago in order to have $700 billion today.

Or, if we knew we wanted to start saving when the Constitution was adopted, we’d have to have started saving over $8.5 million per day about 220 years ago.

I’m trying to figure out what the total federal budget was in 1789, but all I can find that’s official is a claim that total receipts from 1789-1849 was $1.1 billion. Not sure if that’s average or accumulative, though the subsequent budgets seem to indicate the latter.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budge…04/pdf/hist.pdf

Will someone check my math? If true, this is starting to firm things up a bit.

Here’s a better visualization. Imagine each dollar in the $700 billion is a grain of salt. A tablespoon of salt would contain roughly 100,000 grains of salt. A half a cup of salt would contain 1 million grains of salt. So how big is 700 billion grains of salt? If you poured 700 billion grains of salt into the average school classroom, it would fill up about 70% of the classroom.

Even better: If you cashed out that 700 billion in pennies (there actually aren’t enough pennies in cicrculation to do this), you could stack them and create 26 life-size replicas of the Sears Tower, and still have enough pennies left over to give every person in the US more than $58 (5800 pennies each)!