Perspective on the National Debt

Yahoo! puts U.S. debt into perspective with 12 facts about the National Debt. And the perspective is frightening. First Yahoo puts the number “trillion” into perspective: You would spend a million dollars in twelve days if you spent one dollar every second. If you kept spending at this rate, it would take you 32 years to spend a billion dollars. To spend a trillion dollars you would have to spend one dollar every second for 31,000 years!

Then Yahoo does a quick run down on the figures: The 2012 U.S. deficit is $1.33 trillion and the 2013 proposed deficit is $901 billion. The current National debt is $15.3 trillion, which breaks down to $135,773 per taxpayer.

Yahoo follows up with a list of the following 12 frightening facts about the National debt:

1. On January 1, 1791, the U.S. national debt was $75 million. Today, the national debt increases by that much once every hour.

2. Borrowing for the Revolutionary War is where the debt began. President Jackson viewed the debt as a curse and rallied against borrowing, spending, and banks in effort to eliminate all federal debt. By January 1, 1835, Jackson had the debt reduced to a mere $33,733.

3. At the end of World War II, the debt equaled 122% of GDP. In the 1950s and the 1960s, the debt slowly declined to 38% of the GDP in 1970. This year, the debt is expected to equal almost 100% of GDP.

4. The national debt has increased 8.5% annually since 1938. The only time in the past 62 years that the debt did not consistently increase annually at this rate was during the Clinton and Johnson administrations.

5. When Ronald Regan took office the national debt was under $1 trillion and by the time he left office, it was up to $2.6 trillion. During his eight-year administration, the U.S. went from the world’s largest international creditor to the largest debtor nation.

6. The U.S. national debt has more than doubled since 2000.

7. The predicted 2013 deficit is $901 billion, which represents 5.5% of GDP.

8. The national debt increases by $3.8 billion every day.

9. Every business day, the U.S. government now borrows $5 billion.

10. If you taped a trillion $10 bills from end to end, it would wrap around the globe more than 380 times and that still would not be enough to pay off the national debt.

11. The debt ceiling is $16.394 trillion as of January 30, 2012.

12. The U.S. government has to borrow 43 cents of every dollar it spends, which is four times the rate in 1980.

See Jill Schlesinger, 12 Scary Debt Facts for 2012, Yahoo!Finance, Feb. 16, 2012. 

Special thanks to David S. Luber (Attorney at law, Florida Probate Attorney Wills and Estates Law Firm) for bringing this article to my attention.