Well, The Math No Longer Works For Me, How About You?

It has been said that everything comes down to math. Even CBS has a TV drama called Numbers where crime is solved for the FBI by a mathematician. Let us look at just one of the numbers that we all should be concerned about.

DEBT

We all have heard the MSM (main stream media) talking about some government program that will cost xxx billion dollars. Well, what does that really mean to us? To understand what the numbers really look like, let us compare what 1 million, 1 billion and 1 trillion really looks like.

Let us say that you were told to throw $1 into a bonfire in front of you every second. How long do you think it would take to go through $1 MILLION, $1 BILLION and then $1 TRILLION? Will it take a day, a week, a year, how about ten years? Well let’s work out the math, because, afer all, it is just a math problem.

There are 60 seconds in a minute = 60/min
There are 60 minutes in an hour… 60 x 60/hr = 3,600 seconds per hour
There are 24 hours in a day… 24 x 3,600 = 86,400 seconds per day
There are 365 days per year… 365 x 86,400 = 31,536,000 seconds per year

Okay, now we have a numbers to work with. Now take 1,000,000 and divide it by 86,400 (seconds per day) and you get 11.57 days. Yep, to go through $1 Million it would take 11 and a half days.

Now let’s try the same thing with $1 BILLION. We would take 1,000,000,000 and divide by 31,536,000 (seconds per year) and you get 31.7 years. So to go from 1 million to 1 billion, you increase your time throwing money in the fire by about 31 years.

Before going any further, take a guess how long it takes to go through a Trillion dollars.  Just guess, get a piece of paper and write it down before reading the next paragraph.

What did you guess...100 years, 500 years, maybe a 1000 years. Okay, have you guessed? If so, continue reading.

Now let us figure up $1 TRILLION. We take 1,000,000,000,000 (yep, that is a 1 followed by TWELVE zeros) and divide it by 31,536,000 seconds per year and we come up with 31,709.79 YEARS. Gosh, you better get a stool as it is going to take you a long time to burn $1T at a dollar a second.

WOW, so going from 1 million to 1 trillion is a HUGE leap. Now does this help you understand what 1 TRILLION dollars really represents?

In February 2010, our congresscritters increased the U.S. Debt limit to $14.3 TRILLION from $12.7 TRILLION. That doesn’t sound like much as it is only $1.6 TRILLION, but now you know what a trillion dollars really represents. It is anticipated that we will reach the $14.3 TRILLION by the end of this year!

If we examine the National Debt Clock, we can see what our government, oh I mean We The People, owe. Yes, you and I owe this money. You might say, “no the government owes the money”. I ask you…where does the government get the money to spend? Yes from We The People! So in essence, we owe this money. So how much do you owe, well I’ve included a link

 National Debt Clock 

to see exactly what we each owe. Sit down before you look though, as you won’t like it. Write the number down and come back and visit it in a week a month and three months and see how fast the number grows. Remember, just like any loan that you and I have, we have to pay interest! We can talk about that at another time.