The federal government ran another big deficit in June, as the national debt inches closer to $35 trillion.
$35 trillion USD.
Trillion with a 'T.'
That's an unfathomable number. It's meaningless to most people. We simply can't comprehend a number that big.
Let's try to put the $34.9 trillion national debt into perspective.
According to the National Debt Clock, every American citizen would have to write a check for $103,565 to pay off the national debt.
Of course, a lot of people don't pay taxes. That means the taxpayer burden is much higher. Every U.S. taxpayer would have to write a check for $266,953 to wipe out the debt. And that's on top of the taxes we already pay!
To put it another way, $35 trillion is more than the total economies of China, Japan, Germany, and the UK combined.
It's hard to wrap your head around how big 1 trillion is, much less 35 trillion. Here are a few factoids to help you visualize just how big that number is:
A trillion seconds is about 32,000 years.
If you could say one number every second, it would take about 11.5 million days to count to 1 trillion.
If you had spent $1 million every day since the birth of Christ, you still wouldn't have spent $1 trillion.
If you line up dollar bills end-to-end, you could go to the moon and back around 203 times with $1 trillion. You could wrap them around the earth about 3,893 times.
If you stacked up 1 trillion dollar bills, the dollar tower would rise to 67,866 miles.
One trillion grains of rice would weigh about 20,000 metric tons.
Keep in mind that all of these examples only illustrate the size of $1 trillion. The national debt is nearly 35 times that number.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/putti ... understand
How much does the US pay in interest on national debt?
In 2023, the federal government spent $658 billion on net interest costs on the national debt. That total, which grew by 38 percent from $476 billion in 2022, was the largest amount ever spent on interest in the budget and totaled 2.4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).
https://www.pgpf.org/budget-basics/what ... ional-debt
