Coronavirus

Floor Speech

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Mr. JOHNSON. Madam President, let me first say that I wish this Chamber were full of our colleagues who had listened to my Republican colleague's description--the Senator from Pennsylvania--of what this bill is and what this bill isn't. It is not a COVID relief bill. Senator Toomey did an excellent job. I am hoping that people are watching it on their TV screens. They really can't be reading the bill yet because it is not constructed. I don't want to repeat all of the excellent points the Senator from Pennsylvania made, but I wanted to come down because I think we have grown immune to these vast amounts of money.

I always knew we were going to be in big trouble when we stopped talking about hundreds of billions of dollars and switched to talking about trillions of dollars. When we talk about $1 trillion or $2 trillion, it just doesn't sound like as much as $200 billion or $800 billion, which was in the stimulus package under the Obama administration. The fact of the matter is we have already authorized $4 trillion in COVID relief. That is 18 percent of last year's GDP, and, roughly, $1 trillion is yet to be spent. Some of that isn't even obligated, and we are going to be debating, over the next couple of days, $1.9 trillion. So I just wanted to come down here to the floor and try to illustrate what a massive amount of money $1.9 trillion is. You have to use analogies. Again, the human mind really can't contemplate what ``a trillion'' is.

I found this first analogy--my wife talked to me about it--in terms of time. This one is simply talking about, if I would give the Presiding Officer $1 per second, how long would it take me to give her $1 million? You see the chart here. It would take 11.6 days. Again, with $1 per second, how long would it take to give her $1 million? 11.6 days.

The next question: How long would it take you to accumulate $1 billion?

Again, when you do the math, you find out it would take 31.7 years. That was back when the Chinese had their protests in Tiananmen Square.

The next question: What about $1 trillion?

This is what becomes mind-boggling. If I gave you $1 every second and I wanted to give you $1 trillion, it would take 31,688 years to give you $1 trillion. That takes us back to beyond the last glaciation period, a period in time when Wisconsin was under a mile-thick glacier.

By the way, as a quick aside for my colleague, the Senator from Rhode Island, since that point in time, about 20,000 years ago, the water level in the San Francisco Bay has increased 390 feet. Now, that is global warming--that is a rise in sea level--but that is what happened through natural causes. That was an aside.

How long would it take to accumulate $1.9 trillion? Over 60,000 years. Again, put that in context. The human race began to develop language about 50,000 years ago. So that is the time analogy.

Another way of looking at this is through distance and volume. So here is the calculation. I should have brought a $1 bill to just demonstrate its thickness, but the thickness of a $1 bill is 4.3- thousandths-of-an-inch thick. To illustrate how much $1 trillion is, let's start with $1 million. If you stacked a million dollar bills on top of each other, they would stack up to be 358 feet high. You can see the calculation here. That is about a 30- to 35-foot-story building.

How big would a stack of a billion dollar bills be? It would be 67.86 miles.

Now, there is something called the Karman line. I think I am pronouncing that right. That is the point at which the atmosphere ends and outer space begins. That is 62 miles. So a stack of a billion dollar bills would actually exceed the atmosphere and extend into outer space--62 miles.

Then, the next question is: How big would a stack be of a trillion dollar bills? Well, it would be 1,000 times that. So it would be 67,866 miles high. That is an astonishingly large stack of dollar bills that equals $1 trillion.

Again, we are not just talking about $1 trillion. We are not talking just about 67,000 miles worth. We are talking about $1.9 trillion, which would stack up to be 135,732 miles high. The distance to the Moon is 238,900 miles. So that stack of $1.9 trillion worth of $1 bills would be more than halfway to the Moon. That is what we are debating spending--a stack of dollar bills that extends more than halfway the distance to the Moon. This is at a point in time when we are about $28 trillion in debt. That single stack would be over 1.9 million miles or, if you were to put it relative to the Moon, there would be eight stacks--seven stacks that go directly to the Moon and one further stack that would be 95 percent of the way there.

These are astonishing sums that we are talking about, and the majority party here wants to jam this through using the reconciliation process--no consultation with our side. They want to just blow it through here with 20 hours of debate, a vote-arama, pass $1.9 trillion in spending, and go home, having no consideration whatsoever about the fact that we are mortgaging our children's futures. At some point in time, there will be a day of reckoning--a debt crisis--and it won't be pretty.

My suggestion, at least as we consider this, is to actually have a debate. Let's have a discussion. Let's consider the amendments. Let's not do this in 20, 24, 30 hours. Let's take the time to seriously consider what we are doing to our children in contemplating spending a stack of dollar bills over 135 miles high, extending more than halfway to the Moon.

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