News Link • Government Debt & Financing
Putting the National Debt Into Perspective We Can All Understand
• https://www.activistpost.com, By Mike MaharreyThe federal government ran another big deficit in June, as the national debt inches closer to $35 trillion.
$35 trillion USD.
Trillion with a 'T.'
That's an unfathomable number. It's meaningless to most people. We simply can't comprehend a number that big.
Let's try to put the $34.9 trillion national debt into perspective.
According to the National Debt Clock, every American citizen would have to write a check for $103,565 to pay off the national debt.
Of course, a lot of people don't pay taxes. That means the taxpayer burden is much higher. Every U.S. taxpayer would have to write a check for $266,953 to wipe out the debt. And that's on top of the taxes we already pay!
To put it another way, $35 trillion is more than the total economies of China, Japan, Germany, and the UK combined.
Visualizing 1 Trillion
1,000,000,000,000
It's hard to wrap your head around how big 1 trillion is, much less 35 trillion. Here are a few factoids to help you visualize just how big that number is:
There are 1 million seconds in 11.5 days. A trillion seconds is about 32,000 years.
If you could say one number every second, it would take about 11.5 million days to count to 1 trillion.
If you had spent $1 million every day since the birth of Christ, you still wouldn't have spent $1 trillion.