| August 14, 2009 Fun with the National Debt |
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“There are 1011 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.” - Richard Feynman |
The national debt has been a problem for this country for as long as I have been alive. Our elected officials have been spending more money than they take in as taxes every year since the sixties.
It has gone from a problem, to a big problem, to a REALLY big problem, to absolute insanity. Now, no one man or political party is responsible for this debt, and I’m not here to place the blame, so don’t get your panties in a bunch!!
I’m not here to talk about the problems regarding the national debt. I don’t want to talk about how we got here, how we can get out of it, or what the heck this means for us. All I’m here to do is to try and get our heads around the national debt.
The National debt is on the order of tens of trillions of dollars, but even one trillion dollars is beyond the scope of anything we will ever encounter in our day to day lives. Even Wal-Mart, number one on the Fortune 500 list, racks up only $378 billion in revenue a year, and only $12 billion in profit. Even the Wal-Mart CEO says is looking at the national debt and exclaiming “Good lord that’s a lot of money!!”
So, for the average every day Joe, a trillion dollars, even a billion dollars, is beyond our comprehension. If we are lucky, we can rack up a million bucks worth of income (before taxes) in our lifetime, but that’s about it.
So, like I said, I am here for us to develop a tangible understanding of the magnitude of the national debt. First, I’m going to determine how big it is in terms we can understand, and then I’m going to talk about it in terms of paying it off.
So, here we go.
I did a Google search about the national debt on August 8, 2009 at approximately 1:00 pm, eastern standard time. I found that the debt was calculated to be:
Okay, a trillion is 1 x 1012. Now, like I said, it’s hard to think about that much money. So let’s turn it into something a little more tangible.
According to Google searches, a dollar bill is about 6.14 inches long. Okay. Now let’s pretend we printed the number of dollars we need to pay off the national debt. Now, let’s put them side by side so that they are touching end to end and attach them, so we make a giant dollar bill chain of the national debt. It would look something like this:
How long does that come out to be?
(Now, I know my calculations are only good to three significant figures because of the whole 6.14 thing, but Excel just doesn’t understand the concept of significant figures. So, again, please prevent your panties from bunching up!)
Okay, 1.14 billion miles. I know it’s about a thousand miles to drive from Houston to Augusta GA, so we need to think bigger. Let’s think globally. Can we wrap our national debt dollar bill chain around the equator of the earth?
| Circumference of Earth’s Equator: | 24,874 miles |
| National Debt Dollar Bill Chain: | 1,138,545,404 miles |
Uh, yeah, we can. We can do it about 45,773 times, and still have enough leftover get from Houston to Augusta.
Okay, so we need to think above globally, and start thinking astronomically. Can our national debt dollar bill chain reach the moon?
| Distance from the Earth to the Moon: | 238,857 miles |
| National Debt Dollar Bill Chain: | 1,138,545,404 miles |
Uh, yeah, we could make a round trip to the moon and back over two thousand times, actually. I guess we need to think even bigger. So, what’s the biggest thing in our solar system? The sun!! Can our national debt dollar bill chain reach the sun from the Earth?
| Distance from the Earth to the Sun: | 92,955,788 (93 million) miles |
| National Debt Dollar Bill Chain: | 1,138,545,404 (1.14 billion) miles |
Okay, well we’re getting closer, but our dollar bill chain can still go from the Earth to the Sun and back six times.
Time to fall back and punt. Since we’re going to the sun anyway, let’s just assume we attach one end of our dollar bill chain to the center of the sun, and see how far into our solar system it can reach. All these numbers come from Wikipedia, by the way.
| National Debt Dollar Bill Chain: | 1,138,545,404 miles | |
| Distance from the Sun to Mercury: | 35,983,004 miles | |
| Distance from the Sun to Venus: | 67,238,048 miles | |
| Distance from the Sun to Earth: | 92,955,788 miles | - Okay, well we knew it was going to go past earth anyway |
| Distance from the Sun to Mars: | 141,634,777 miles | |
| Distance from the Sun to Jupiter: | 483,766,652 miles | - Wow, we’re in the outer planets now |
| Distance from the Sun to Saturn: | 890,703,868 miles | - Almost… |
| Distance from the Sun to Uranus: | 10,188,351,700 miles | - Got it!! We can’t reach Uranus!! |
There you go. Our dollar bill chain of the national debt would reach in between Saturn and Uranus. I am trying SO HARD not to make an anus joke! Here is a visual representation of the numbers above:
Okay, so now we’ve got a visual, somewhat tangible comprehension of the magnitude of the national debt. If we attach a dollar bill chain of the national debt to the sun, it can reach past Saturn. Got it. Now let’s try to pay it off.
Let’s pretend we can TIME TRAVEL!! Let’s go back in time and pay off the national debt. Where’s a good place to start? Well, let’s go back to the founding of our country, July 4, 1776. On the day I did this calculation, 233 years, roughly 85,134 days have passed since the founding of our country. If we wanted to go back in time and save up to pay off the national debt, I would need to save:
Okay, 138 eight million smackaroos a day is a bit out of my price range. Let’s go back a bit more, say, year zero. Let’s start saving from the birth of Christ. I calculate 2009.59 years or 734,002 days since January 1, 0. In order to pay off the debt, I would need to save:
Well, that’s not happy, I don’t make anywhere near $16 mill a day. Bummer dude. Well, what else can we do. Let’s go back to the time of the dinosaurs. Dinosaurs went extinct like what, 63 million years ago? That’s about 23 billion days. In order to pay off the debt, we would need to save:
Okay, that is a lot more than I make in a year, it’s a lot more than most of us probably make in a year, but at least that’s tangible. If you make about $190,000 a year, and you have a time machine, you can go back to right after whatever meteor struck the earth, and if you save your entire salary for the next 63 million years, you could pay off the national debt.
Okay, well, I admit it, these numbers are a bit funny. I mean, we ALL owe into the national debt, right? We should ALL be paying it off, right? Right.
So, let’s do that. Again, Google found a site to tell me that the current population of the US is about 307,093,195 people. Groovy.
Let’s assume we all live the Leave it to Beaver lifestyle. All 307 million people live in a nuclear family with 2.3 kids. That equates to about 71,417,022 families. Now, I have no idea if that’s how statisticians do it in the real world, but just for poopies and giggles, let’s see how much these 71 thousand families owe:
See, that’s no so bad. If we just donated 100% of our household incomes paying off the debt, we could have it done in less than a decade, probably! Of course we would all die from starvation, but whatever.
Let’s make it even better! Let’s kick those bastardly teenagers out of the house, (along with their younger siblings and babies) make them get a job, and see how much money we owe per each human being residing within the United States!
Brilliant! That’s just $20,000 above the poverty level for a single person! Better yet, let’s let the whole world pay off the debt with us! That will really make the numbers happy! Google helped me to learn that the current global population is 6,775,701,399.
BAM!! There you go. All we have to do is convince every single person in the world to contribute $1,734, and we can have the national debt paid off, just like that. BAM!!
Of course, that’s probably more than people make a year in some countries. And it doesn’t take into account children, the elderly, and whoever else just doesn’t work.
But you know what, the heck with it. This is the national debt we’re talking about here. Logic and sanity flew out the window decades ago. Why bring them into the equation now?
| The National Debt: | $11,748,898,503,745 |
| Length of 11,748,898,503,745 dollar bills: | 1,138,545,404 miles |
| Distance from the Sun to Saturn: | 890,703,868 miles |
| Cost per Day Since the Birth of America: | $138,004,370 a day |
| Cost per Day Since the Birth of Christ: | $16,006,624 a day |
| Cost Per Day Since the Death of the Dinosaurs: | $511 a day |
| Debt per US Family: | $164,511 |
| Debt per US Resident: | $38,258 |
| Debt per US Earthly Intelligent Sentient Life-Form*: | $1,734 |
*Excludes dolphins and some species of monkeys. Includes Paris Hilton, regrettably. I guess I really could have saved us all a lot of heartache if I had just said per Human on Earth, but who cares!?!? This is the national debt baby!!
See, wasn’t that fun? You don’t have to let politics depress you all the time. We just had an epic adventure to Saturn guys! To Saturn! I haven’t had this much fun since Dan Quayle was in the spotlight!
But what the hell do I know.
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[It's] time for the human race to enter the solar system. -Dan Quayle
It’s time for the national debt to enter the solar system. |