I came across this debt ticker over at Marvelous Medley:
Just look at that number… $11 Trillion dollars and growing fast! A trillion is a large number, and a bit hard to wrap my head around, so I looked around for some comparisons. I came across this over at tysknews:
Trillion = 1,000,000,000,000.
The country has not existed for a trillion seconds.
Western civilization has not been around a trillion seconds.
One trillion seconds ago – 31,688 years – Neanderthals stalked the plains of Europe.
NPR gave this for comparison:
$1 Trillion would be enough money to buy about a 1,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies for every person in the United States.
And here is a youtube video to give a bit more explaination:
It is hard to wrap one’s head around this number. Take the above, multiply it by 11. Now you have our current debt. Next year, we’ll be adding around $2 Trillion to that number. And we will continue to add Trillions to the debt every year until we get this out of control spending in check.
The United States GDP was just over $14 Trillion in 2008. Yes, our debt is nearly as much as our entire GDP! The interest payments on this debt is the third largest item on our budget at over $412 Billion. Now, throw in that the Federal Government alone is slated to spend over 27% of our GDP this year. Certainly someone other than me has to see the obsurdity in this.
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Posted under Economy
Written by admin on March 24, 2009
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You wouldn’t happen to know how much of our debt comes from Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II – would you?
Not near as much as Obama will (just look at the path he’s put us on in his first 60 days), the graph is right there on the post. It is lame to try to insinuate that because Bush ran up debt it’s OK for Obama to do it. This level of debt is absolutely obscene regardless of who is signing the approval!
No, I’m not insinuating that because Bush ran up the debt it’s okay for Obama to do it. I’m asking how much debt Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr., and George Bush Jr. ran up? I’m pretty sure it was a lot. I mean, off the top of my head Ronald Reagan took the debt from 700 billion to 3 trillion. Yet nobody says anything about this.
Interesting how fast the debt will continue to pile on. Obama spends money just as fast as the printing presses can crank it out (and maybe even faster).
The that because one guy did it, it’s ok for me to do it is what got us into this mess to begin with. People tend to look at debt like it doesn’t REALLY mean anything, unfortunately, we have to make our minimum payment, just like any other debt, and when your amount goes up, so do the payments. When this happens, we need to cut other government spending in order to have the money. Just look at the way spending has decreased for education over the last 20 years.
It is a key factor in the budget Obama has put forth that many of the issues he is dealing with come from Bush and the Republicans spending money like drunken sailors. It will take time to right this ship that Bush just about sunk. At least Obama has a plan to work us out of the deficit, I don’t recall much of anything from little George except he took a surplus and turned it into the largest deficit. When he became president they were talking about what were they going to do since there would be no need to sell treasury bonds and savings bonds. They were figuring out what they would base mortgage rates that were tied to things like this.
I know it is a popular mantra of the left to go “…but, but, but Bush!!!” The fact is that Obama has taken what Bush did wrong (increase debt) and made it worse. If Bush was a drunken sailor, I can’t even fathom what Obama is. His “plan to work us out of the deficit” has been shredded by the CBO as based on fantasy and not reality. Obama’s plans will dramatically increase the deficit and take Bush’s debt mistakes to entirely new levels. In case you missed the graph, here’s the link again: http://www.rwnj.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/obama_debt_surge.gif