$827B + $350B + ?

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As the Senate continues to debate the enormous 'stimulus' bill, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has postponed until Tuesday announcement of plans for the second $350 billion for the second installment of the Trouble Assets Relief Program (TARP) passed by Congress in October. Adding up the stimulus and TARP (parts 1 &2) plus interest payments approaches $2 trillion.

One trillion is 1,000,000,000,000 - 10 to the 12th power, or a thousand, thousand, thousand, thousand. To put things in perspective, current estimates put the number of stars in the Milky Way at somewhere between 100 and 400 billion. The U.S. population is slightly over 303 million, and the world population is around 6.6 billion.

$1 trillion would be enough money to buy about a 1,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies for every person in the United States. A trillion barrels of oil would - at current consumption levels - fuel the world for about 33 years.

To be fair, President Bush recently set the unfortunate precedent of rushing through the TARP package without a clear plan for making the measure effective at reviving the credit market. But that doesn't mean we should compound the error by letting President Obama intimidate us into passing an even larger spending bill with little focus or full knowledge of its contents.

A more focused and less costly bill should be passed reasonably quickly to help enable economic recovery.