"Hey Buddy, can you spare a Billion?"

Here’s a sobering thought for a Thursday.  We hear a lot about our National Debt being $16 Trillion; in reality after combining Social Security mandates and a bunch of other stuff that is never discussed, the true number far exceeds $80 Trillion.

Anyway, for the sake of today’s thought, I’m going to work with the $16 Trillion figure.  Most people can imagine what a puny thing like a Million or even a Billion is.  However, a lot of people can’t get their arms around such a number as a Trillion, so I’ll break it down; a Trillion is a Thousand Billion, and a Billion is of course a Thousand Million.

Keeping that in mind, I did some fast math.  To make this math work, the US Government would first have to grind to a dead stop and completely stop spending, which is impossible.  If they then got serious and started paying off the debt of $16 Trillion at the rate of $100,000,000.00 a day, (that’s $100 Million) it would take 10 days to pay off a Billion.  

Multiply that by 1,000 and it takes 10,000 days to pay off a Trillion.  Now, follow me here, if one simply multiplies that by 16, we’re looking at 160,000 days to pay off the $16 Trillion.  As if that doesn’t sound scary enough, when you divide the 160,000 days by 365 days to a year, you realize just how screwed we are, because that works out to over 438 years; and that is without taking the staggering interest on the money into account.

I even decided to bring it in a little tighter and figured out what it looks like if we paid $1,000,000,000.00, (that’s a Billion) a day.  We would cut the time dramatically to only 16,000 days, which is a mere 43 years; again not factoring in the interest.  

Couple this with the fact that the US Government currently borrows and spends around $5B to $6B per day and it’s easy to see that there is no way possible to turn things around; certainly not with the current administration. 

By the way, the ridiculous class warfare notion of increasing taxes on what Obama calls the wealthiest Americans, or those earning over $250,000.00 a year, (even at a rate of 70%) would in reality only increase revenues by around $80 Billion a year.  That equals about 13 days’ worth of current spending.  Another way of looking at it is this.  At the borrowing rate of $6 Billion a day, we’re borrowing $2.2 Trillion per year, and our total revenue is around $1.8 Trillion per year; adding an increase of $80 Billion in taxes to the revenue pot wouldn't amount to a cup of water in a lake. Anyone else see a huge deficit here? 

I’m not the smartest guy on the planet and I don’t pretend to have all the answers to such a mess; however, one doesn’t need a PhD in economics to realize we’re in deep Kim Shee, and if we don’t drastically cut spending to the absolute bare bones minimum, we cannot and will not survive financially.