Given the crisis in this country, I feel obligated and compelled to post this diatribe regarding our national debt in the United States.

First, here's what 100 million dollars looks like if we stacked it up in $100 bills:

Think about this...most of us consider $100 a lot of money. This pallet is composed of 1 million $100 bills. When we talk about millionaires in this country, most of them have a lot less than this pallet.

Pay attention to the figure standing next to the stacks, this will become important later...

Image credit: http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html

Second, if we expand this to 1 Trillion dollars, it looks like this:

Do you still see the person?

Image credit: http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html

Third, the national debt in 2009 (11 trillion)

Don't forget to notice how small the figure standing next to the stacks has become...

Image credit: http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/usdebt.html

Fourth, as of February 2012, our current national debt has exceeded 15.1 trillion, just a little MORE than our 2011 annual GDP of, you guessed it, $15.0944 trillion...

I want to interrupt the flow here to ask a very important question:

What happens when YOUR total DEBT EXCEEDS YOUR total INCOME?
Answer: Nothing good....

They (our honorable leaders) bury these numbers, but search for "2011 GDP" at the U.S. Dept of Commerce site: http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/gdp/gdpnewsrelease.htm

That means we need to add 8 more stacks to the 22 stacks in the 2009 illustration just to correctly reflect the debt as of Feb 2012, almost 50% increase in 2-3 years.

Another way to think of this is, if there are approximately 300 million people in the U.S. and a trillion is equivalent to a "million million", to pay off our debt, every last one of those 300 million would need to cough up $50,000.00 (this includes little Jenny laying in her crib and grandma sitting in her rocker).

Math: (1,000,000,000,000 / 300,000,000 ) * 15 = $50,000

or more simplified....

Math: (1,000,000 / 300 ) * 15 = $50,000

The good news is, if everyone on the planet (7,001,934,391) kicked in, it would only be $2,142 each. I think that I did my math right here..... trillion = 1000 billion, so 15 * 1000/7....more or less

To see the populate of the U.S. and the world, go here:
http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html

So, everybody make sure that when they hear someone talking about increasing the debt by "just a" trillion dollars, for each trillion increase, that is $3,333 per person in the U.S. just like that. By the way, that means that the current administration (we know who this is, right??) has COST each person in the U.S. $16,665 since they took office, and the bleeding hasn't stopped yet....

According to the U.S. government bureau of labor and statistics there are approximately 154 million people in the u.s. labor force (although 9+ million are presumably unemployed...if you believe these stats...)

By the way, considering that the labor force (less unemployed) is only 145 million people and they are the people paying taxes, you might as well turn that $50,000 per person into $100,000 per person.

Keep this in mind when you vote in 2012. All of these entitlement programs, and other miscellaneous B.S. that we pay for sounds great, especially to those who aren't paying for them....but eventually, you WILL run out of OTHER PEOPLES MONEY and then the playing field will be truly LEVELLED!