At the time of this writing the National Debt stood at more than $5.3 trillion. Given a population of more than 266 million people in the United States, in January of 1997, this amounted to approximately $20,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country.
A family of four owes $80,000
Put on workers alone, each person with a job owes $39,072
If you put aside $7 million a day from the time of Christ, from the beginning of the Gregorian calendar, and if the National Debt did not rise higher than it is today, you would have enough to pay off the National Debt on December 11, 2000.
If you had a stack of $100 bills 40 inches high, you would have one million dollars. If you made a nice neat stack of $100 bills the size of the National Debt it would extend 3,346 miles into space. Not inches, not feet or yards, but 3,346 miles.
If you put the current national debt in silver dollars all in a line it would go around the world, at its more than 24,000 nautical mile circumference (equator, or any great circle) more than 5,000 times. That's the equivalent of an eight-lane superhighway paved entirely with silver dollars going all the way around the world.
If we got every man, woman, and child in the entire world to help us, everybody in our known galaxy, they would each need to chip in $1,000 to help the United States of America get out of debt. Can you imagine yourself going up to the door of some poor family of four in India or Haiti to tell them they should donate $4,000 to the greatest superpower on earth in order to help it out of debt?
Every year, the federal government (U.S. Treasury), must pay more and more in simple interest on the debt. Since there are no payments whatsoever going against the ever increasing debt itself, these interest payments become more and more of a burden on each year's national budget and thus the average taxpayer.
Interest on the national debt in 1996 was $344 billion. This year, 1997, the interest payment will be atleast $357 billion. This is based upon all the 2 month, 6 month, 52 week, 2 year, 5 year, 10 year and 30 year notes, bonds, bills and securities the U.S. Treasury continuously auctions-off to sustain and/or increase the National Debt. This interest rate on new issues could rise anytime. It's under the control of The Federal Reserve.
The 1996 interest of $344 billion was more than the yearly cost of operating the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines combined.
Each percentage point increase in interest rates or inflation equals a $53 billion increase in the annual interest payment the federal government must pay. (Do you think this has any bearing on Alan Greenspan's hesitancy to raise interest rates? Do you really think stock market investors have much to worry about in terms of rising rates?).
How would you like to have this interest money to spend on education or health care every year?What's more, if we did not have this huge interest payment then we would not have a deficit. We would have either a surplus or additional monies to spend on education, health care, war or whatever. Or we could have an honest tax break.
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