Putting the national debt into perspective

Listen to Dave Ross’ Commentary: Putting the national debt into perspective

At last check, the total amount of money owed by the federal government was over $15.1 trillion. Do you know how much that is?

If you spent a dollar a second, $15.1 trillion would last close to 470,000 years. Or, if you turned $15 trillion into a stack of thousand dollar bills, it would reach over 943 miles.

You notice something?

Yes! The media always picks the scariest examples. And it depresses people, which you shouldn’t do during the holidays.
How about making the debt look less scary for a change.

How about if instead of thousand-dollar bills, we simply stacked trillion dollar bills; then 15 trillion would be a stack of only 15 bills, just over one-sixteenth of an inch high.

I saw a scary example that if every dollar was a grain of sand, and you packed 15 trillion grains of sand into soda cans, you’d have 2,516,000 six packs of sand.But why do that?

Instead, you could you let each dollar represent one atom, in which case, the debt would be so small, you would need 5.2 million national debts to equal the number of atoms in a single grain of sand. I like that a lot better. And to really put it in perspective, if you printed up 15 trillion dollars as an uncut sheet of one dollar bills, it would only be enough to blanket an area equal to Iowa and New Hampshire, which is what the candidates do every four years anyway.

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