Carl Sagan meets Everett Dirksen

The late great Carl Sagan made famous the phrase "billions and billions." The former Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen once said of U.S. federal spending, "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money." Now these two perspectives combine in the form of a captivating infographic called The Billion Dollar Gram.

Information Is Beautiful has collected a several dozen buckets of data — from the size of the yoga industry to spending on the Iraq War to the Chinese...