Debt Woes

When looking through some old files on some sites today, I came across a weird little gadget on an old site that, for some reason or another, was set to display the number of milliseconds that had passed since midnight on January 1, 1970. At the time I accessed it, the count was somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.2 trillion milliseconds.

What scared me was the fact that our National Debt was actually about 8.5 times higher than that. In trying to compare the actual National Debt to milliseconds, I came up with a comparative date somewhere in mid 1681. Yes, you read that right. If you were to go back in time the number of MILLISECONDS corresponding to the number of dollars in our debt at the time of this post, you would find yourself in the 17th century.

I decided to take this a step further and come up with a general estimate of how much money our country has spent, on average, per second, since our founding. Assuming that the country was started on July 4, 1776 and ending at 11:59PM on October 15, 2008... This country has spent, on average, just over $1400 more than what we can afford... per second.

How horrible is that!??

Sadly, most of that has been in recent years. At the time of this post, the debt is increasing, on average, just under $30,000 per second. This is deplorable.

Something needs to be done. We need to stop borrowing money and get our debt under control. If we let it grow much more, we will not ever be able to afford paying it back. At an average growth rate of 8.50% annually... Our payments of less than half a trillion dollars per year result in the debt increasing annually. Even if we were to double the payments we currently make, the debt would never decrease. We would have to increase our annual payment to roughly $1 Trillion to even start making a dent.

Something is wrong.