Wednesday, August 26, 2009

If we had a dollar a day...we'd never get out of debt

I just read that scientists estimate the universe to be 13.73 billion years old. (in a story about warp drive theory), and it got me wondering--is our national debt greater than the universe's age?

Some quick math shows that if we stopped spending and tried to pay back the debt at $1 a day, we would not be able to pay it back in the life of our universe. (The universe is 5,011,000,000,000 (five trillion, 11 billion, approx) days old. Our debt to date is 7,395,572,420,301† (seven trillion, 395 billion and growing). Check it out here.

I remember when the debt hit a trillion, and folks thought our economy would collapse. Twenty-five years later, we're still going strong--and have increaded the debt seven-fold. What's that say about our economy? Our government?

No comments: