If you’ve been listening to the news lately, you know there’s a huge debate in Washington over raising the national debt limit.
Currently, our national debt stands at about $14.3 trillion, give or take a few billion, and President Obama’s administration and the Democrats in Congress want to raise the debt limit by another $2.4 trillion. They say lots of really nasty things will happen if someone cancels the nation’s credit cards, and the economy, which is already in the dumper, will get even worse. The Republicans, on the other hand, say no way. They won’t raise the debt ceiling unless huge cuts are made in federal spending, and they’ve held the line so far. On May 31, the U.S. House of Representatives defeated a measure that would have raised the ceiling, and promised that the rest of the process would be long and metaphorically bloody.
I get the sense that ordinary people are concerned about this issue at some level, but I have a feeling one of the reasons we’re not locking ourselves in darkened basements and becoming hermits is that it’s virtually impossible for most human minds to comprehend or visualize how much money we’re talking about here.
Sure, if you held their feet to the fire, most folks (many of whom can’t balance a checkbook) could tell you that there are 1,000 thousands in a million, and 1,000 millions in a billion. Following that formula, they could probably figure out that there are 1,000 billions in a trillion (1 million millions). At that point, I think all of us would agree that we’re talking about a whole lot of money, but we just can’t imagine the scale. To help out, here are some interesting facts, courtesy of the fine folks at National Public Radio, who apparently have enough time on their hands to dope this out.
When our national debt neared the $1 trillion mark in 1981, then-President Ronald Reagan said it would take a stack of $1,000 bills 67 miles high if you wanted to pay it off in cash. He said he thought we should probably wait to pay it off, however, because there weren’t enough black bags in the whole world to hold it all. OK, I made that last part up, but you get the point.
Stacked in dollar bills, the current U.S. debt would stretch to the moon and back, twice (and it wouldn’t get you through a single “exact change” toll on the Garden State Parkway).
If we put $14.3 trillion in a stack of $1,000 bills (I don’t think that many exist. When was the last time you saw a $1,000 bill? In my case, that would be never.), our pile of money would soar 900 miles above the Earth. If the International Space Station, which hovers about 220 miles above Earth rammed into that pile of cash, the 680 miles worth that would crash down would likely knock the station out of space, where, according to my calculations, it would likely fall on Topeka, Kansas.
One million dollar bills would cover two football fields. A billion would cover four square miles. The money it would take to pay off our $14.3 trillion debt in $1 bills would blanket the entire state of Illinois. There are some people in Indiana and Iowa who’d say that was a peachy idea, but I’m a White Sox fan, and I’d hate to have anything happen that would dampen their chances of winning the World Series this year.
Along those lines, according to the helpful reporters at NPR, it might help to understand that the human race is thought to be about 200,000 years old. If you tried to pay off our national debt at $1 per second, it would take almost 400,000 years. One trillion seconds, it turns out, is a little more than 30,000 years. I spent a trillion seconds waiting to get my driver’s license renewed at the New Jersey Division of Motor Vehicles before they revamped it and made it “user friendly,” and I truly wish someone had been paying me $1 per second for my inconvenience and frustration. All they gave me was some bad news. They told me I had to go home, get more paperwork, and come back with proper documentation that would add up to the official number of “points.” If you are divorced, as many Americans happen to be, I’m guessing you’d say you spent a couple trillion seconds in that marriage — unless you were marking the length of your marriage in dog years, and then the total would be way more.
So there you are, and I hope it helps you visualize the amount of money you and I owe, unless we let them borrow $2.4 trillion more. According to the last census, there are 308,745,538 people in America. Just for giggles, let’s say half of them — 154,372,769 — are taxpayers. If each of them pays $10 a day toward the national debt, it would take them …
Sorry, folks, but I really can’t do this right now. Not only is my calculator too small, the whole exercise is making my brain ache, and I need to spend some time in the basement.
I’m sure East Brunswick residents breathed a sigh of relief last week on word that the township and Toll Brothers had finally reached a deal on the disputed Golden Triangle development. In 2005, Toll Brothers agreed to buy the property for $30 million, but the agreement reduces the price to the $22.5 million they’ve already paid. According to local officials quoted last week, this is a “great economic deal” for the township,
And it might sound like one, until you start wondering how many football fields $7.5 million in $1 bills would cover. That would be 15.