COMMENTARY: National debt beyond comprehension

The U.S. Debt Clock says our country is in hock for more than $36 trillion.

How massive is a trillion dollars? Consider this comparison from ThoughtCo — if you earn $45,000 a year, it would take you: 22 years to amass $1 million dollars, 22,000 years to amass $1 billion and 22 million years to amass $1 trillion.

Heck, I remember the good old days when a billion used to be a number so big nobody could comprehend it.

Still struggling to understand how big a trillion is?

Consider: One trillion is equal to one thousand billion. If you had $1 trillion in cash in 2017, reports econ4u.com, you could buy 282 billion Big Macs, or 3.1 million Ferrari 599 GTBs, or 769 new Yankee Stadiums, or 28,571 flights into space as a tourist, or 66.7 billion copies of Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street.”

If you had $1 trillion in debt and paid it back at the rate of $10 million a day, it would take you 273 years — assuming the loan is interest-free.

Our federal deficit has been growing by the trillions since the economic crisis of 2008. Our politicians love crises because they can jack up spending and debt all the more. Unfortunately, though, our federal tax receipts during 2024 totaled about $5 trillion, spending was almost $7 trillion. It’s why even after the huge spending splurges during the pandemic have stopped, our federal debt is still growing so fast.

Still not comprehending how much $1 trillion is? Then you’ll like this description by Bill Bryson from his book “Notes from a Big Country.” Bryson asks his readers to guess how long it would take to initial and count a trillion $1 bills if you worked without stopping.

If you initialed one dollar per second, he writes, you would make $1,000 every 17 minutes.

After 12 days of nonstop effort, you would acquire your first $1 million. Thus, it would take you 120 days to accumulate $10 million and 1,200 days to reach $100 million. After 31.7 years you would become a billionaire. But not until after 31,709.8 years would you count your trillionth dollar.

We all understand that very large numbers are OK so long as they add up. So long as we have trillions of dollars coming into the government to balance out the trillions of dollars we have going out, we should be OK — but we haven’t been OK.

Regardless of what you think about Donald Trump and our new Republican-controlled House and Senate, you had better hope their policy changes unleash economic growth. You better hope that President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency can truly reduce our spending and slow down the growth of our debt.

Hey, our national debt is more than $36 trillion, for goodness’ sake — that’s 36,000 billion dollars. If you still can’t comprehend how big a number that is, consider this slightly modified illustration from econ4u.com: If the U.S. government printed $1 million bills, “a whole bathtub’s worth of them wouldn’t equal a trillion dollars.” And 36 bathtubs full of $1 million bills still wouldn’t be enough to cover our national debt.

Contact Tom Purcell of Cagle Cartoon Newspaper Syndicate at Tom@TomPurcell.com.