Comprehending the US Debt

[buggirlexpres]

Okay, I'm tired and I'm bored, so I'm just going to write this. Excuse me if I go off on tangents or whatever.

So, we know that the US debt is over 17 trillion dollars. In order to understand that number, we need to understand the difference between millions, billions, and trillions.
Imagine, for example, that you can say exactly one number per second, regardless of the length of the number. Say you started at one and kept counting. Counting to one hundred would take a minute and a half. One thousand would take 15 minutes.
Then it stops being easy. One million would take one week to count to. One billion would take 35 years. And one trillion? You can't even accomplish that in your lifetime. It would take 35,000 years to count to.
If you made one US dollar per second (which is an outrageous amount), it would take over 595,000 years to pay off the US debt.
If everyone was worth 100 dollars, and we sold every human in the history of the world (some 100 billion), we would have paid off just barely half of the US debt.
Hopefully this puts into scale how much money we'd have to pay to dig ourselves out if this huge hole. At this rate, if we stood on the debt ceiling, we'd be at the moon


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[Qazplm601]

i'm lucky i live in canada

 

[null123]

Fun fact: The us national debt is more than all the phyiscal currency, IN THE WORLD.

 

[DoomSquirter]

The sad part is that runs completely tangent to the idea that there is no such thing as value. As in, we push paper currency around which is associated with a value of gold that is supposedly held in fort knox, and that is what causes the currency to rise/fall (along with a lot more things too numerous and confusing to list). That idea has been around for a very long time. But now?

Now, your worth is more a transient quasi state that can vary from good to bad based on all these market conditions that are not mentally attributable w/o going crazy (or having a lawyer/acct present) and even then, eyes rolling into back of head is probably normal for anyone having it explained to them. This applies to corporations, conglomerates, even people with credit cards, etc.

It's easier to just imagine it like 3 card monty. as long as nobody notices the king's not wearing clothes, all is well. As silly as the show is, Continuum seemed to be a pretty damn close approximation to how our future will turn out if things continue the way they do. If it were star trek, we'd be the ferengi.

For more conspiracy theory type thoughts, look at how bad network news has been for the last 30 or so years. Capture eyeballs, stress over stupid things or terrible things ad nauseum, but then skip the hard reporting phase for the most part, like during the watergate affair, etc... Keep people stressed out over that so they don't have time to look at the real problems facing us. If you must talk about those things, hyperbole and misinformation seems to be the norm versus simply stating facts and getting to the point. I pity the youth since they are the ones that are going to be most hit by all of this. Good luck! You're going to need it.

 

[TheMechEngineer]

You know what's really laughable in all this, it's the fact that conspiracy theorists are pointing out that the US hasn't returned to the moon since Apollo 11 and start to freak out about alien invasions on the moon discouraging any return missions. They can't seem to learn that there's a thing called....'debt' lol
I don't know a whole heck of a lot about politics but the debt seems to be a result of the US head honchos wanting to be top dog of all other countries, and so as a result they have a finger in every pie. Billions were wasted on the failed X-plane program for the US defence, but that tends to be normal business when the government enjoys working on expensive cutting-edge experiments that don't always work. It's a wonder that the Mars Rover projects still get the green light.

 

[Celestialphoenix]

As a stack of $100 bills- you're looking at a pile around 11390 miles high.

in comparison the international space station is just over 200 miles above the surface.
and the diameter of the earth is just under 8k miles.​

So tunnel through the earth, hit the ISS twice and still have enough left to build a castle out of...

Fun fact: The us national debt is more than all the phyiscal currency, IN THE WORLD.

Which planet do we owe this money?

 

[null123]

As a stack of $100 bills- you're looking at a pile around 11390 miles high.

in comparison the international space station is just over 200 miles above the surface.
and the diameter of the earth is just under 8k miles.​

So tunnel through the earth, hit the ISS twice and still have enough left to build a castle out of...



Which planet do we owe this money?

Hehehe. I said physical. 90 Perecnt of currency is actually virtual, and doesnt actually exist 0.0