The U.S. national debt exceeded $36 trillion for the first time on Thursday, according to the Treasury. It first exceeded $35 trillion 115 days ago.

It took 192 years, from 1789 to 1981, to accumulate the first trillion dollars of national debt.

These round numbers have no significance beyond being an occasion for a headline, but our politicians’ unwillingness to face budgetary reality is a dire problem.

Dave Hebert at AIER has some fun facts about $36 trillion:

• If we stacked $100 bills one on top of another, the stack would be 24,431.8 miles tall. The Earth has a circumference of 24,901 miles. We could lay this stack of $100 bills around the entire planet and come remarkably close to getting all the way around. In fact, we’re less than $800 billion in debt away from being able to completely encircle the globe, which at the rate Congress spends money should be achievable by April 2025.
• $36 trillion in $1 bills would weigh 39.7 million tons. By comparison, the Hoover Dam weighs about 6.7 million tons.
• If we laid $1 bills end to end, it would be 3.5 billion miles long. Traveling at the speed of light, it would take you 5 hours and 6 minutes to get from one end to the other. As another comparison, Voyager 1, which launched into space on September 5, 1977, is currently estimated to be about 15.4 billion miles away from Earth.