Fun Facts About Our National Debt

Today I learned that the national debt this year is the highest it has ever been.  I hope you're sitting down - It is 14 trillion dollars.  Now people, especially our esteemed politicians throw around the words billion and trillion like they mean nothing.  So I thought you would like a little perspective on it.  Keep in mind I am no economist, but I did do a little research this morning so I could try to at least sound like I know what I'm talking about.

First what is 14 trillion dollars?  Well think of it this way.  If you stacked one dollar bills on top of each other, you could go from the Earth to the Moon and back, TWICE.   Using figures from The United Nations, ending world hunger would take 195 billion dollars a year, so with 14 trillion you could feed the world for the next 72 years.  If you laid the money out you could completely cover, Rhode Island, Delaware, Connecticut, New Jersey, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and West Virginia . . . all at the same time.

That is all amazing but still so hard to wrap your head around.  So I will bring it down to something you could understand,  If you had a monthly household income of 6 thousand dollars your credit card dent would be well over 3 hundred thousand dollars.  Fortunately, our government gets a much better interest rate than we simple folk do, so the money from out budget that goes to interest on our debt is only 414 billion dollars. That is just paying interest.  We get nothing for that money.

To put that in perspective for you , with that 414 billion dollars a year, you could run NASA (19 billion) , the Department of Education (93 billion), and the Department of Transportation (78 billion) , TWICE.  If we were not paying this interest, we could cut the either the entire Department of Defence budget, or the entire Health and Human services budget by over half. IN fact it is the single biggest expense in our National Budget behind those two huge departments.

DO I have a simple solution, I have no idea.  But I do know if we ran our households like these politicians are running our country, we all would have been bankrupt, or in jail a long time ago.  And if we don't get a hold of this run away train, we actually could go bankrupt as a Country.  If you don't believe this can happen, ask Greece.

If nothing else, this does make me wonder a few things, is this a good time to be passing National Health Care? Is this a good time to be lingering in the Middle East after a decade of war?  Is this a good time to be cutting taxes to make a few people feel like your doing something for them? I for one, don't think so.  Maybe all these things are important, I am not saying they aren't. Braces for my kid is important,  having good clothes for them to wear is important,  a college education is important, but if I just don't have the money for them, we  do without.  I don't borrow myself into bankruptcy.  Or worse make it so bad that they inherit the dept and it crushes them as well.  It really is that simple.  Somebody, please stop the madness.