U.S. Debt

The most valuable tool to assess the calamity in US finances here:
http://www.usdebtclock.org/index.html

Have you ever seen a $100 bill? Sure you have.

Ever seen a wad of them totaling $10,000. Perhaps.

What about our national debt amount, 15 trillion dollars? Ever seen that?

To give you an idea of how much money the United States' National Debt is, let us break it down for you:

This is $1 million in cash ($1,000,000). On a global average, it takes 92 years of work to total this much money. Not the heaping piles of cash we all expected like in the movies, huh?

This is $1 billion dollars ($1,000,000,000): What can you get for a billion dollars? You could buy a really big submarine from Germany. Or the world's most valuable athlete, New York Yankees' Alex Rodriguez, could give you an idea... to total $1 billion with his world record salary, he would have to play over 16 more years of baseball, every...single...day... (That's 5,890 games in a row...look out Cal Ripken, Jr.!)

Below is $1 trillion in cash ($1,000,000,000,000): In 2010, the US government had a 1.7 trillion deficit and this image shows the volume of cash the government borrowed in 2010, alone, to run itself. *Fun fact, if you spent $1 million a day since the birth of Jesus Christ, you would have not spent this much money by now. Rather your total would be around $700 billion which is actually the amount the banks received during the bailout.

Below is $15 trillion in cash ($15,000,000,000,000) – Unless the U.S. government fixes our budget, the national debt will surpass 15 trillion by Christmas of this year. That is 20% of the entire world's combined GDP and in 2011 the National Debt will exceed 100% of our GDP, and start going into the 100%+ debt-to-GDP ratio that has countries like Ireland, Portugal, Greece, Italy, and Spain (Euro PIIGS) are dealing with... bankrupcy.

What to expect for our future? Let's show you...

Below is 114.5 trillion dollars ($114,500,000,000,000): This is the U.S. unfunded liabilities. This is calculated on current tax and funding inputs, and future demographic shifts in the U.S. population. This is the amount of money the U.S. government knows it does not have to fully fund the Medicare, Medicare Prescription Drug Program, Social Security, Military, and civil servant pensions. It is the money the United States of America knows it will not have to pay all its bills. (Our stacks of money are taller than what used to be two of the tallest towers in the world, the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center Twin Towers.)

Let us not forget that as US citizens, we owe this much as well. We are all in this one together, unfortunately, with each of us currently owing $46,137.73!