Let's talk about my inheritance. As a twenty-something year old American, I have only recently become fully vested with my rights as a citizen. I have been financially self sufficient for about seven years and have accumulated only a single piece of debt: one of my cars is due to be paid off in just over a year. Pretty neat, huh? Well I guess I share some liability for the United States' total governmental debt. True, I have only voted a few times, and I have been vocal about the danger of deficit spending and the need to increase revenues. True, the current government debt was accumulated against my will and mostly before I was a citizen, but I'll be honest: I have benefitted from the building of infrastructure, etc., etc., so I can pony up a bit. What's that? The debt wasn't accumulated building infrastructure? You say that it was accumulated to fund tax breaks, expand Medicare, and finance unjust, unpopular wars? You say that our national infrastructure is neglected, unmaintained, and in drastic need of repair? Huh. Well, maybe I shouldn't really be held responsible for other people's profligacy, especially if it occurred before I was conceived.
Alright, sarcasm aside, I have a bone to pick with you if you are 35 or older. I was listening to this absolutely fantastic little BBC podcast called More or Less, here, and in an episode from 5 August, 2011, I learned a staggeringly worrisome fact. This fact was related to the size of the U.S. government debt (at the time) which was projected at $14.3 Trillion. That's $14,300,000,000,000 or, if you fancy scientific notation, $1.43 * 10^13. According to the podcast, if you were to make a stack of $100 bills worth $14.3 Trillion, the stack would reach far into space. How far? Well, given a thickness of 0.004" for each $100 bill, the stack would be about 9030 MILES high. That is significantly greater than the average diameter of the Earth. I decided to have some fun with the figure and use a scale that is more relevant to a poor SOB like myself: the $1 bill. Assuming an identical thickness of 0.004" for each bill, we have simply to multiply the height by a factor of 100. Do you think that it reaches to the moon? The moon is, on average, 238,835 miles from the Earth. So the answer is YES! Almost four times! So you could make three and three-quarters stacks of $1 bills tall enough to scrape regolith off the surface of the moon, and that pile of money is equal to our government's outstanding debt obligations, at least as of last August. Hopefully we haven't reached four stacks yet. Now, if I have my math correct, converting to a stack of pennies (each 0.061" thick) gives us a stack 1,376,736,109.84 miles tall. Anybody know what an Astronomical Unit is in miles? The answer is 92,955,807.273 miles. So yes, our debt in pennies stacked vertically would be more than tall enough to touch the sun.
Next time, I will discuss the moral implications of this literally astronomical amount of debt.
