NEWS Political war brewing over $1.35 trillion deficit

RED INK | Senate scuttles bipartisan task force on taxes, spending

Thinking of counting to a trillion one second per number? Better get started. It will take 31,688 years.

And tack on a few more years if you want to go for 1.35 trillion, the dollar estimate for the federal deficit in the current budget year.

The whole sum could be taken care of if every American, all 300 million of them, forked over $4,500.

In 1981, President Ronald Reagan commented that “a trillion dollars would be a stack of $1,000 bills 67 miles high.” The debt, the accumulation of annual deficits, now stands at more than $12 trillion.

Put another way, the $1.35 trillion could pay for 40,000 players like Alex Rodriguez, whose $33 million salary in 2009 made him baseball’s richest man.

Think the $6.25 billion paid out by Goldman Sachs in salaries and bonuses in 2009 was a lot? The federal deficit could support the payroll of 216 such financial firms.