This is Planet Money from NPR.

In the next few weeks, it's likely that Congress will pass and President Biden will sign

a bill to spend $1.9 trillion.

Trillion.

I still like to pause and step back when I hear Trillion because, you know, like, okay,

think of a billion.

Billion is already an unfathomably large number.

It's a lot.

And then a trillion, it's a thousand, it's a thousand billions, a thousand.

So this bill is a 1.9 thousand billion dollar bill.

And that's on top of the $3 trillion that the federal government spent last year.

And these trillions of dollars have done a lot of good, like the money paid for additional

unemployment benefits for people who lost their jobs and for stimulus checks to most Americans

and for hundreds of millions of vaccines.

The key thing here is the government was able to spend all this money without having to

raise taxes and without having to cut spending on other things because the government borrowed

every dollar of the extra money it spent.

And it's about to borrow trillions more.

And this is sort of amazing.

It feels almost like a trick.

Like where did the money come from?

How can the government just borrow $5 trillion in a single year?

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