Want more visualizations? MightyBargainHunters.com has even more ways to wrap your head around that many zeroes:

• $10 trillion in Lincoln cents would make a solid cube over half a mile on a side. This dwarfs the tallest structures in the world.
• $10 trillion in one-dollar bills taped end to end stretch almost 970 million miles. This is five round-trips to the Sun. It takes light almost an hour and a half to travel this distance.
• $10 trillion accumulates over $1 billion in interest per day at 4%.  It accumulates in four seconds more than the average US worker makes in a year.
• $10 trillion would last Montgomery Brewster over 27,000 years, and you could pay off a hundred Dr. Evils with it.

So why is it important to know just how much a trillion dollars is? Because the U.S. National Debt is currently closing in on $12 trillion. Time to begin work on another penny cube!

Yeah, Jessica Alba doesn’t have anything to do with this, but I thought a whole post on tax rates might be kind of boring.

The April CBO report breaks down the percentage tax rates that Americans at different income levels are paying. We pay a variety of taxes, of course, like sales taxes, Social Security taxes, and everyone’s favorite: income taxes.

What surprised me was that almost half of all households actually have a negative income tax rate. That’s right, negative. The bottom quintile’s (note: quintile is a fancy word for “fifth”) individual income tax rate is -6.6%, and the second quintile’s rate is -0.8%. This doesn’t really make sense at first, but the negative rate is due to tax credits and deductions. And according to the IRS, 45 million households didn’t owe any federal income tax in 2006.

(It’s important to note that this figure only includes income tax, and the government does take money for other things, like paycheck deductions for Social Security benefits.)

The way the numbers break down, 20% of households pay about 86% of total income taxes (which I guess makes sense, as that 20% includes Bill Gates, etc.) But I was surprised again to learn that a single person earning $71,200 is actually part of the “top 20%” that is apparently supposed to pay for the federal deficit. Someone making $71K, particularly here in D.C., isn’t exactly diving into a pool of gold coins every morning.

Anyway, the CBO report is worth a look.

• One Thousand Times- 18%
• Ten Thousand Times- 12%
• One Hundred Thousand Times- 21%
• One Million Times- 21%
• Ten Million Times- 17%
• Don’t Know- 12%

Check out our new video: We went out in front of the White House and asked people a simple question, “How many millions are in a trillion?”

Click here to view the embedded video.

This report presents the findings of a telephone survey conducted among a national probability sample of 1,001 adults comprising 501 men and 500 women 18 years of age and older, living in private households in the continental United States.  Interviewing for this CARAVAN® Survey was completed during the period April 23-26, 2009.

The plan calls for the federal government to work with private investors to try to restart the market for the troubled mortgage loans and securities, which in turn officials hope improves the financial condition of banks that have received billions in capital injections from the government already. The federal government will pair as much as $100 billion with private capital to generate $500 billion in purchasing power to buy the assets, and Mr. Geithner told reporters the plan could reach $1 trillion in size over time.

Of course, the U.S. Treasury Department isn’t giving a hundred billion dollars in cash for free. The government-provided funds available to investors looking to purchase “troubled” assets, as identified by the banks currently stuck with them. The highest bidder for such assets will receive “50% of the equity requirement of their purchase” from the Treasury.  If the plan works and these assets increase in value, the Treasury actually makes money on their investment.

Whether it is too much or too little to help the credit markets rebound will surely be the subject of much debate-the contentions are far too controversial and technical to go into here-but what is certain is that $1 trillion is a lot of money.

To put it into perspective, if you had $1,000,000,000,000 in cash, you could buy:

• 282 billion Big Macs
• 3.1 million Ferrari 599 GTBs
• 769 New Yankees Stadiums
• 28,571 flights into space as a tourist
• 66.7 billion copies of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street

And in case you’re a visual learner, PageTutor.com has this illustration of a man standing next to $1 trillion worth of $100 bills:

UPDATE: Econ4U has released a survey and video on how many Americans can correctly identify how much $1 trillion is. We also have a page with more statistics and visualizations here.