Our national debt: thirty-one trillion(ish) dollars. It doesn't look like that much when you read it like that. It really looks just like thirty-one million, only with a letter or two swapped out.
Do you know how much thirty-one trillion actually is? Do you have any idea how long it would take one person to count from one to one trillion? Much less thirty-one trillion?
It would take one person 32,963 years of continuous counting to count from one to one trillion... conservatively.
Don't believe me? The math is easy. It takes 25 seconds to count from one to 100. At this same rate it would take a person 28 hours to count to one hundred thousand, counting to a million would take 280 hours, a billion would be 280,000 hours of continuous counting, a trillion would take 280,000,000 hours, or almost 32,000 years.
Obviously people need to eat, and sleep... And in counting, the higher the numbers, the longer it takes. "Six, seven," comes out faster than "One hundred two thousand three hundred ninety-six, one hundred two thousand three hundred ninety-seven," so like I said before, these numbers are conservative.
But based on being able to count from one to one hundred in 25 seconds, it would take one person 990,853 years to count our current national debt out assuming they count fast and never eat or sleep.
That's longer than math has existed. That's longer than people have existed!
I know, I know, it's totally unrealistic to think of our debt being counted by one person. Our debt divided equally amongst all living Americans is "only" about $90,000 per person. (And exactly how many Americans have an extra ninety grand hanging around?)
We could outsource it to the world, then it's only about $3,000 a person!
Perhaps a more disturbing way to think of our debt is in terms of gold. The price of gold in May 2023 was about $1800 an ounce. One ton of gold is 32,150.7 troy ounces. Our current debt of $31.4 trillion would buy 542,595 tons of gold... The only problem being that only 197,596 tons of gold have been produced in all of human history.
So we are 345,000 more tons of gold in debt than the total amount of gold ever mined, panned, plucked, or plundered.
And they are going to make that debt $50,000,000,000,000.00
Unbelievable? No, uncountable.
Image: PxFuel