10 Sobering Facts About the National Debt

2. Physical Size of Debt

Picture a wooden pallet stack six feet high with $100 bills. Seem like a lot of money, right? That would be $100 million, nothing to shake a finger at. Now, if you stacked those pallets two high and filled an entire American football field with them you would have a trillion dollars. A trillion dollars is a lot. If you spent a $1 million a day since the first day of the Common Era in year 1, or the birth of Jesus, you still wouldn’t have spent $1 trillion. Yet the federal deficit is more than that each year. So what does $116 trillion look like? Take that football field full of pallets stacked with $100 bills and stack those pallets high—like 1.5X the height of Twin Towers! See that tower next to the Twin Towers in the photo above? That’s our total national debt in hundred dollar bills…