Mystified by America's Debt Crisis? Here's Why Some People Are More Than A Little Concerned

"Watching and Waiting"

Numbers, when they are large enough, become less real and truly challenging to wrap one's arms around. The larger the number, the more abstract it becomes as a concept. This may be why all these discussions about increasing the national debt fail to alarm so many people. Instead of discussing how much the country owes, politicians try to focus our attention on what we, the public, are going to get.

Look over here (at free college education) and don't look over there (at the price tag you will be saddled with in the long run.) 

If you go online to find out how much debt our country carries, you will find a variety of sites with numbers that don't entirely match. What you'll find, though, is the numbers are very, very large.

I remember when the pundits were in near hysterics when the 1981 proposed budget under Ronald Reagan crossed the one trillion dollar mark. Raising the debt ceiling a 2.5 trillion seemed easy-peasy last week with nary a peep.

Here are some numbers from Truth In Accounting.  

U.S. Published National Debt consists of:

• debt held by the public

• intragovernmental holdings, including debt held by Social Security and Medicare trust funds
  
  

OUR PUBLISHED DEBT IS now over 31 trillion...

but out REAL debt is 140 Trillion.

SINCE OUR GOVERNMENT is us, as in you and me, this debt shakes out to be $936,000 per taxpayer.

When the government states that they want to raise the debt ceiling so they can give us more good things, what they mean is that they want you to OWE MORE, because it is OUR Debt.

The website Trading Economics presents a slightly scarier picture. They not only present the status of government debt, but also private debt. Private debt is the total of all individual and business debt. Going a step further, they calculate the ratio of total indebtedness of both sectors, non-financial corporations and households and non-profit institutions serving households, in relation to GDP.

At this moment in time, according to this site, our cumulative debt is 235% greater than our current GDP.

* * * 

Well, to be frank, I don't know how accurate any of this is, and I'm not even sure anyone knows. What I do know is that these are all fairly large numbers. How big is a Trillion? This illustration will bend your mind a little, I believe.

What happens when nations fail to meet their debt obligations? Can they really just default the way individuals do by declaring bankruptcy?