Putting the National Debt Into Perspective We Can All Understand, by Michael Maharrey

Every taxpayer would have to write a check for almost $267,000 to pay the national debt. From Michael Maharrey at moneymetals.com:

U.S. government borrowing and spending never stops. 

The federal government ran another big deficit in June, as the national debt inches closer to $35 trillion.

$35 trillion USD.

Trillion with a ‘T.’ 

That’s an unfathomable number. It’s meaningless to most people. We simply can’t comprehend a number that big.

Let’s try to put the $34.9 trillion national debt into perspective.

According to the National Debt Clock, every American citizen would have to write a check for $103,565 to pay off the national debt. 

Of course, a lot of people don’t pay taxes. That means the taxpayer burden is much higher. Every U.S. taxpayer would have to write a check for $266,953 to wipe out the debt.  And that’s on top of the taxes we already pay!

To put it another way, $35 trillion is more than the total economies of China, Japan, Germany, and the UK combined.

Visualizing 1 Trillion

1,000,000,000,000

It’s hard to wrap your head around how big 1 trillion is, much less 35 trillion. Here are a few factoids to help you visualize just how big that number is:

• There are 1 million seconds in 11.5 days. A trillion seconds is about 32,000 years. 
• If you could say one number every second, it would take about 11.5 million days to count to 1 trillion. 

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