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.