The National Debt Clock in New York, in April. Yuki Iwamura/Associated Press
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that Trump’s domestic policy bill will add at least $3.3 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. That number is so large that it’s difficult for most people to comprehend. Our writer Evan Gorelick did the math.
Say you start playing the lottery the day you’re born. If you somehow managed to win every game in every U.S. state, every single day — we’re talking everything from scratch-offs to Powerball jackpots — it would still take you around 75 years to rack up $3.3 trillion (assuming, of course, that you pay taxes on your winnings).
Here are five other ways to think about $3.3 trillion:
It’s enough to buy every piece of real estate in Manhattan — all 1.1 million residential and commercial properties — twice, based on recent valuations.
It’s more than the combined wealth of Musk, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and the next 18 richest people in the world.
If distributed evenly, it would be enough to give every U.S. household more than $25,000.
Broken into $100 bills, it would create a stack 2,200 miles high — far beyond the orbit of the International Space Station. Laid end to end, those bills could wrap around the Equator 128 times.
If you spent $1 every second without stopping, it would last more than 104,000 years. If you spent $1 million every day, it would last more than 9,000 years.