History in the Making

The lawmakers in the U.S. House now have the attention of the nation and the world, as they have scaled back the government.  We call it the "shut down."  Now the government spending is bumping up on the debt ceiling, and something has to be done.

This is a Hobson's choice.  If they raise the debt ceiling, we go further into debt.  We continue to add to the future troubles.  If they don't raise the ceiling, then they set in motion the financial catastrophe that has been building since the Reagan years.  There is no good way out of this.  They tell us that this is complicated.  In the details, it is.  In principle, it is as simple as a piggy bank.

Government is a monster that needs to be fed money.  It consumes money faster than we can earn it and mail it in.  It grows every year by design.  Some have grown tired of feeding the monster, wishing that it would be satisfied.

The next step may make history.

A Long Time to Pay Off the Debt

We are fooling ourselves if we think that we are ever going to pay off the U.S. national debt.  

What is the national debt, anyway?  Think of it this way.  Imagine that you get an allowance of $10 per week.  But you end up spending $11 per week.  You have a spending deficit of $1.  That extra money has to come from somewhere, so you borrow it from your sister.  After the first week, you owe her $1.  But you keep up that spending pattern, and every week you borrow another dollar from her.  After 12 weeks, you owe her $12.  That is your total debt, not including the interest you owe her.  You add up the deficits to determine your debt.

Our national deficits have recently been over $300 billion, and according to the National Debt Clock  our national debt is over $16.7 trillion dollars.  The numbers are so big that we can’t really understand them.  

Let’s put those numbers in perspective thinking of these numbers in terms of time.

There are 86,400 seconds in a day. 

A million seconds is about 11.6 days.

A billion seconds is about 31.7 years.

A trillion seconds is 31,710 years.

The earliest records of human history date back about 5000 years.  So one trillion seconds is more than 6 times as long as human history.  History itself has not experienced a trillion seconds.

So, if the U.S. never borrowed another penny and began paying off the debt at a rate of a dollar per second, we would pay off the debt in about 529,557 years.  If we paid off the debt at a rate of $1000 per second, it would still take us over 529 years.