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The national debt of the United States is just under $30 trillion. But let’s go ahead and call it an even $30 trillion. Because it will get there soon enough.
Let me say that again. The United States owes individuals, businesses and foreign central banks nearly thirty trillion dollars.
Thirty trillion is such a large number that its meaningless to most of us. It’s unimaginable. There is simply no way for most people to comprehend a number with that many zeros.
Let’s see if I can help.
When people talk about really large numbers, they’ll sometimes use the word “astronomical”. So, one way to describe 30,000,000,000,000 would be to say that it is an astronomically-large number.
Let me tell you something Skippy, “astronomical” is in our rear-view mirror.
Tonight, go outside and take a look at the sky. If the sky is clear, you might be able to see about 2,500 stars. There are only about 5,000 stars visible to the naked eye and the earth will block out about half of them wherever you stand. Every single one of those stars are in the same galaxy, our galaxy, called the Milky Way.
No one really knows for certain how many stars are in the Milky Way, but the generally accepted estimate is that it contains 100 billion stars.
Think about this: It would take 300 times more dollars to pay off the national debt of the United States than there are stars in our entire galaxy.
If you were to take 30 trillion one-dollar bills and stack them one on top of another, the stack would be 2,035,985 MILES high. That’s 8.5 times the distance from the earth to the moon or nearly 1/10th of the distance from the earth to the sun.
If you laid those same dollar bills end-to-end and followed the path you created, you’d find yourself about 30 million miles on the other side of Neptune.
Since we’re playing this game, let’s take it a bit further.
The interest payment on the national debt for fiscal year 2021 is budgeted to be $378B. That’s three hundred seventy-eight BILLION dollars. Just in interest.
That means, the interest payment alone is 3.78 times larger than the number of stars in the Milky Way. A stack of 378 billion one-dollar bills would be nearly 26,000 miles high. And a path made of those dollar bills would take you to all the way to Mercury.
It’s time to bring this back down to earth.
The best estimate I can find is that the average American household pays $8,367 in federal taxes. The number might be slightly more or slightly less than that, but this is the number I was able to come up with.
If the average tax return collects $8,367 dollars, just making the interest payment on the national debt will consume the entire tax burden from 45.2 million households. And that’s not paying back any of the principal, just interest.
After we’ve used the tax revenue generated from 45.2 million households on interest payments, whatever is left we can use for infrastructure, Obamacare, welfare programs, giving free stuff to illegal aliens and funding gender studies in Pakistan.
At least that’s the way it’s supposed to work.
But, after paying back just the interest on the money we’ve already borrowed, there won’t be enough left to pay for hardly any of that. So the government will do what it always does and borrow even more money.
Anyone who understands how compound interest works also understands that if you don’t pay the interest, things quickly reach a point where you can never recover. And if you continue to borrow more principal at the same time, it happens even faster. If the United States government doesn’t get a handle on their run-away spending, we’re going to quickly reach a point where simply making the minimum payment isn’t going to cut it anymore.
And, when that happens, I’ll be back to help you imagine what a quadrillion dollars looks like.
