One of the problems in trying to comprehend federal spending is that the units involved–billions of dollars–are so large as to be almost meaningless to many citizens. To visualize what a billion dollars means, imagine that some organization had been spending a thousand dollars a day every day since the birth of Christ. They would not yet have spent a billion dollars. In the year 2000 they would still be more than 250 million dollars short of one billion dollars. Government agencies of course spend not one but many billions of dollars annually. HEW alone spends about 82 billion dollars annually. To get a figure comparable to what the entire federal government spends annually, change the one thousand dollars per day to half a million dollars per day, every day since the birth of Christ. At the end of two thousand years the grand total would amount to less than three quarters of what the federal government spent in 1978 alone.

–Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions, p. 306

That’s a lot of money. And to think that the National Debt is 8 trillion dollars right now.