WASHINGTON -- President Reagan says a trillion dollars is a stack of $1,000 bills 67 miles high.
In his economic speech Wednesday, the president said the national debt is approaching a trillion dollars, a figure he described a month earlier in another speech as incomprehensible.
'I've been trying to think of a way to illustrate how big it really is,' Reagan said. 'The best I could come up with is to say that a stack of $1,000 bills in your hand only 4 inches high would make you a millionaire. A trillion dollars would be a stack of $1,000 bills 67 miles high.'
But the presidential calculations may have missed by a few miles, according to figures worked out by United Press International.
A 4 inch stack of $1,000 bills equals $1 million.
$1 trillion ($1,000,000,000,000) divided by $1 million (the value of the 4 inch stack) equals 1 million. Therefore there are 1 million stacks of $1,000 bills 4 inches high. That means there are 4 million inches of money.
Four million inches equals 333,333 feet. Divided by the 5,280 feet in a mile, the distance is 63.1 miles.