LetSA国际影视传媒檚 do a little time travel. We will go back to the 1950s, when I was a kid.

Back then a million seemed like an incredibly large number. It was rather hard to try to imagine it. In school, one teacher used the example that if you had a $1,000 bill, you would need a thousand of them to get to a million. I have never owned a $1,000 bill and only once saw one. A fellow I know had one just to show people that it existed.

Hundred-dollar bills still make me a little nervous, so $1,000 bills would give me heartburn. Why? Well, what happens if you lost it or it turned out to be counterfeit. Then you would be out $1,000. They no longer exist because on Jan. 1, 2000, the government took the $1,000 bill out of circulation. The $1, $2, $25 and $500 bills had been discontinued earlier. So, the big and the little bills all disappeared.

If you counted out loud and did one number per second, 24 hours a day, the internet says it would take 11 days and 14 hours to count from one to a million. However, try saying 999,999 in one second, so thatSA国际影视传媒檚 all hypothetical. In 2007, a fellow named Jeremy Harper counted aloud 16 hours a day and live streamed it. It took him 89 days to do the count, and in the process, he raised over $10,000 for charity.

Back in those days, a pop in a glass bottle from the local corner store was 10 cents. So, if you had $1 million, you could buy 10 million pops. Ten million! You would be set with pop for life. Also, when you returned the 10 million bottles to the store, you would get two cents a bottle or $200,000. So, you could buy a bunch more pop and get another two million bottles. ThatSA国际影视传媒檚 how economics works for kids.

Today, if you had $1 million, you could buy a modest house in Toronto or in Yellowknife and maybe a couple of vehicles. But you would have to be careful what you buy because you need more money to maintain it. There are taxes, utilities, repairs and, periodically, upgrades you need to pay for. ThatSA国际影视传媒檚 how adult economics work.

Now people talk about billionaires and a billion is a thousand million. Wow! I looked it up and, according to an article on the web, there are at least 42 known billionaires in Canada. They are known because they are people who have assets worth a $1 billion and run companies and have stock portfolios that economists can trace. But what about the people who earn their money illegally through crime, drugs and other sources and keep their assets well hidden? I bet there are a few of those around as well.

Now, if you think a million and a billion are big, just try to imagine a trillion. That would be a thousand billion. Apparently, CanadaSA国际影视传媒檚 debt by the federal government is more than $1.2 trillion. It costs Canada $81.8 billion just to pay the yearly interest on that debt.

It is more than a little ironic that almost all the financial gurus say to be very careful about debt because a whole lot of your money just goes to pay the interest on the debt, let alone trying to pay off the amount you borrowed. So you should try to avoid debt. Now, if they are all saying this about individuals, why wouldnSA国际影视传媒檛 it apply to countries, territories, towns and cities?

So, in my lifetime, we have gone from millionaires to billionaires, and it is only a matter of time before trillionaires show up, if they havenSA国际影视传媒檛 arrived already due to our debt. Also, after a trillion, we move to quadrillion, sextillion, septillion, octillion, nonillion and decillion. I am definitely going to have to get a bigger calculator.