WHAT $1 TRILLIONWOULD BUY

Think last year produced a tsunami of red ink for the federal government? Well, a $1.3 trillion deficit is nothing to sneeze at. But the Congressional Budget Office has just come up with an estimate of how much we’ll add to the national debt in Fiscal 2011: $1.5 trillion. That means an extra $1.5 trillion will be piled atop a mountain of national debt that already exceeds $14 trillion.

It’s tough for most of us to get our heads around such a colossal number, so we did a little mental shopping.

See what you can get for a trillion these days.

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By Kevin McCormally

January 2011