SOUNDING OFF:

I recall Sen. Everett Dirksen’s famous observation, “A billion here and a billion there, the first thing you know you’re talking about real money.”

Since the day George Washington took office, our country has racked up a national debt of $10.3 trillion. That covered a bunch of wars and the Great Depression and several recessions and the Great Society programs and welfare and food stamps and trips to the moon and farm subsidies and everything else over a period of more than 43 presidents and 200-plus years That’s a whole lot of money over a long, long time.

Now, in just a bit over two months, our new president-in-training is proposing a budget that would obligate us for another $10 trillion or so over the next 10 years, effectively doubling, and, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, maybe even tripling, our national debt.

A trillion has become the new billion. I don’t know about you, but I have quite a bit of difficulty imagining how much that really is. So I set out to put it into terms even I can understand. That was tough, because calculators don’t display 12 zeros. It took one of those yellow-lined legal tablets and my trusty No. 2 Ticonderoga and a lot of computations, but I did it.

Are you ready? Here goes.

Ten trillion dollars would buy everyone in the world 10 Double Doubles from In-N-Out, plus fries and a Coke. It would also buy every other fast food company on Earth — fifteen times over.

A stack of $10 trillion worth of $100 bills would reach 6,899 miles high.

If you had $10 trillion you could buy Exxon-Mobil, and GE, and Wal-Mart, and Microsoft, and Proctor & Gamble, and Johnson & Johnson, and JP Morgan, and AT&T;, and IBM and Chevron. And to kind of spread our risk into the tech sector, we could add to our basket of companies Microsoft, and Google, and Cisco Systems, and Intel, and Oracle, and Apple, and Qualcomm and Amgen. And with the remaining $7.5 trillion you could buy them all again, three more times.

With $10 trillion you could buy a new Mustang convertible with full power and air conditioning for everyone in nine of our western states (not including California: We drive Priuses here). Doing so would also have a rather dramatic and positive impact on the price of Ford’s stock.

Ten trillion dollars is enough to establish reeducation camps for all the cattle in America. Perhaps we could then train them not to continue emitting vast amounts of noxious methane through unfettered and unsavory flatulence that most scientists without a follow-the-herd mentality (pun intended) agree is the major contributor to greenhouse gas pollution.

And $10 trillion is enough to almost certainly bankrupt America. How’s that “change” thing working out for you?

CHUCK CASSITY lives in Costa Mesa