TRYING TO GRASP $1 TRILLION.

One followed by 12 zeros. A trillion. Or, if you like, a thousand billion. Or, the one I find most impressive, a million million.

We used to talk billions in fiscal policy. Now, increasingly, we talk trillions. U.S. President Joe Biden’s proposed COVID package is US$1.9 trillion ($2.4 trillion), though the Wall Street Journal argues only a measly US$825 billion is even remotely related to COVID, the rest being progressive visioning made flesh.

Canada’s federal debt now exceeds $1 trillion, though only in Canadian dollars. If you want to watch it grow, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation has a real-time debt clock. As of this writing it’s at $1,063,743,57 … oops, the rest is moving too fast for me to actually see, let alone copy down. Just watching the numbers spin induces headache. You can imagine how much the heads hurt of the people who have to figure out ways to finance it. Only 100 years ago, not a million, federal budgets listed expenditures down to the penny (a defunct coin). Now, entries as far out as the millions of dollars probably aren’t significant digits.

Imagine: a million million! It used to be a million was a very big number. When I was a kid there was a non-reality (i.e., pure fiction) TV show called “The Millionaire.” A lawyer went around delivering $1-million cheques from a never-seen eccentric who wanted to learn how instant wealth affected people’s lives. If you were in a receiving line, like a prime minister or governor general, and you took 10 seconds shaking the hand of every person you met, greeting a million people would take you almost four months, working 24/7. Though your hand wouldn’t hold up.

But if you wanted to shake the hands of a billion people, it would take you a thousand times longer: a little over 317 years. Of a trillion people? A thousand times that, or 317,098 years. Better get started!

The challenge in grasping numbers so big is to try to, almost literally, bring them down to size. America’s GDP is US$21.2 trillion, so Joe Biden’s US$1.9 trillion is just under nine per cent of that. Is nine per cent of GDP a reasonable amount to spend to get the economy back to producing all it can without straining unduly? Depends how far you are from that point already.

U.S. GDP fell 31.4 per cent in the second quarter of last year, which was unprecedented. But in the third quarter it rose 33.4 per cent, which is also unprecedented. Given the collapse, the rebound was from a smaller base, but how much of a shortfall remains and how much of the US$1.9 trillion will fill the gap rather than simply shuffle the money around from less- to more-favoured groups aren’t easy questions to answer.

As for our own fiscal mega-bucks, the federal Liberals propose borrowing up to $100 billion more to spend on building back politically correctly. Statistics Canada has a population clock — it moves much more slowly than the tax federation’s debt clock, which is part of the problem — and at this writing it shows we’re 38.1 million people. One hundred billion dollars divided by 38.1 million is $2,624.67 for every man-, woman- and child-identified Canadian. For the proverbial, and now probably also mythical, family of four, that’s more than $10,000.

What Canadians need to ponder is whether Ottawa borrowing another $2,600 per person, or $10,000 per family, adding to the more than $26,000 per person and $100,000 per family it has already borrowed on our behalf, will produce more benefits than leaving the money with Canadians to spend or not according to their own likes. Yes, $100 billion of infrastructure spending would put money in the pockets of civil engineers and construction workers. But those are actually costs, not benefits. It’s true that engineers and cement-pourers would spend a lot of what they earned — but if you just want to get money into the economy for people to spend, building $100 billion worth of real stuff is an insanely costly way to do it given that we now have e-transfers.

The crucial question is: what are the benefits of any such infrastructure spending? The big-project record of the federal government does not inspire confidence. We learned this week that a single ship Ottawa has been trying to build since 2008 is still on the drawing board and will end up costing at least $1 billion. That’s $1,000,000,000.00. For one ship. My guess is non-government ships get built a lot faster and cheaper. Same for re-floating an economy.