Is a Twenty Dollar Bill Still Real Money?

Is a $20 bill still real money?  What about a crisp $100 bill?  Have you ever seen a $1000 bill?  How much of an impact would $10,000 have on your life?

What if you won $100,000, would that pay off a mortgage or credit cards or pay for college?

For most of us, One Million Dollars is a real threshold. Winning this much (say in a lottery) would radically change most of our lives. Many of us would retire. 

It is a lifetime's worth of savings for many people, and an ultimate goal for many others. $1,000,000 - THAT is a lot of money. 

A million dollars is one thousand $1000 bills. Nice. 

Now picture this if you will. Picture going onto your bank's website. You log into your account, which miraculously has unlimited funds. You enter your user name and password as you notice your balance is an infinity symbol. 

Suddenly you get a great idea. You are going to pay off the national debt. (Thanks, by the way). 

You go into Bill Pay and set up a recurring payment. After looking up the US Treasury you set up a new Payee. 

The Recurring Payment Amount is $1,000,000 - One Million Dollars. The frequency is once per second. The stupid bank program does not allow payments over a million or payments more frequent than once per second. 

How long should it run?

Our national debt is $17.3 trillion and counting. A trillion is a thousand billion,and a billion is a thousand million. 

So we will need $17 million million. At a million dollars per second it will take over half a year. 

Think of the lives that will be lived, the blood, sweat, and tears, and toil and blisters involved in earning and producing that much wealth. 

We have already spent the money, so we will have to do all of that work just to pay off the debt, without receiving  anything in return. 

And we have not even considered the interest yet. 

The Federal Government must stop spending more than it takes in.