The perils of large numbers.

A hundred million dollars, a five billion dollars, a trillion. It can all get so foggy and hard to grasp.

But Carrie Lukas points out a simple way the Gainesville Tea Party has found to look at how boned the US is budgetwise.

Let’s remove 8 zeros and pretend it’s a household budget:
Annual family income: $21,700
Money the family spent: $38,200
New debt on the credit card: $16,500
Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710
Budget cuts: $385

Evil math! You can't just divide everything by 10,000,000.