Comparing Our National Debt To Time
Wednesday, May 19, 2010 at 9:39AM 
(FLP Opinion) - FL Pundit put together some figures last night comparing our national debt to time. For starters, I looked at our true national debt, which includes unfunded liabilities for social security, medicare and medicaid. That number is fluid, but the latest figure from the US Debt Clock is $108.7 trillion. That said, I have reason to believe through some government sources that it might be as high as $243 trillion. For our purposes, we'll work off of the lower number of $108 trillion.
Let's start by looking at time in terms of seconds. Since the birth of Christ, roughly 630 billion seconds have clicked off the clock. When you consider our national, the vast majority of which was accrued in the last 30 years, is in excess of $100 trillion dollars, 630 billion seconds seems rather small, but it's more than 2,000 years worth of time.
Now, comparing time to our debt, if a $100 bill had been printed every second from the moment Christ was born until now, you would have printed $63 trillion, or just more than half of what we have accrued in debt in the last 30 years. Looking at it another way, if you spent $100,000 every second for those last 30 years that the debt ballooned, you would still come up $14 trillion shy of our current national debt.
I hope that helps show the absurdity of our situation.
Reader Comments (5)
Wow! I haven't seen it put in those terms before. It is absolutely staggering that our leaders could spend that much money. Talk about a house of cards.
That does put it all into perspective doesn't it. Amazing and sickening at the same time.
Absolutely stunning. Nothing more to say.
Taking a different spin on this, let's think in astronomical terms (which is what our debt is).
Our nearest star (other than our sun) is about 4 light years away or 26.2 trillion miles. So if we were paid $4 dollars per mile and could travel at the speed of light, we'd have the debt paid off in 4 years.
Good one Bruce. Here's another. If you were given $1 for every mile traveled, you would have to circle the earth 4.35 billion times to raise enough money to equal our national debt.