Is ten trillion dollars a lot of money if it is spread over the whole world?

 

Not really. It is difficult to make sense of abstract gigantic numbers. (Look at a movie clip from Austin Powers where Dr. Evil switches his demand from a million dollars to 100 billion dollars). This week Donald Trump issued a statement:

 

“Now everyone, even the so-called enemy,’ are beginning to say that President Trump was right about the China Virus coming from the Wuhan Lab. The correspondence between Dr. Fauci and China speaks too loudly for anyone to ignore. China should pay Ten Trillion Dollars to America, and the World, for the death and destruction they have caused!”

 

An article by Tom Hussey at the Express on June 6, 2021 titled ‘China must pay!’ Trump demands 10 TRILLION dollars from Beijing for ‘starting’ COVID-19 said he had repeated that number yesterday in a speech.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is in in for me? That is, what is my share of that amount? Ten trillion dollars is $10,000,000,000,000. The world population is about 7,900,000,000, so it’s just $1266 per person. But the U.S. population is 331,449,281 so, if we instead got it all, that would be $30,170 per person. (We are only about four percent of the world population).

 

Another way to put a gigantic number in perspective is to compare it with others. How does ten trillion dollars compare with either the U.S. National Debt or the annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP)? A web page at Statista titled Public debt of the United States of America from April 2020 to April 2021, by month lists $28.175 trillion for April 2021. On January 8, 2021 the Bureau of Economic Analysis estimated US GDP for 2020 was $20.3 trillion. $10 trillion is about 35% of our debt, or 49% of annual GDP.

 

How about the Trump claim that the virus came from the Wuhan Lab? I think that’s highly questionable. China has a population of 1.44 billion, or ~18% of the world. Just by chance it could have come from there.