Just how much is a trillion dollars? Consider this: If you have a briefcase full of $100 bills, you’d have roughly $1 million. Few of us have ever seen that much money in one place, but we can at least imagine what it looks like. But a trillion dollars in $100 bills would weigh 22 million pounds!

So let’s ban the word “trillion.” It’s a unit of measurement neither understood nor appreciated. If we must use the number, we should give it its proper due. Write it out with all its zeros—all 12 of them. So $15.8 trillion would be $15,800,000,000,000. …

We can’t keep piling more debt onto our children or our children’s children or our children’s children’s children. Otherwise, the million million millions in debt will make their future worthless, worthless, worthless.