The engines of growth can't take it anymore Captain!
In an attempt to find ever creative ways for the average human being to grasp the unimaginable, we'd like to highlight Rick Santelli's comments in a recent interview that given the upcoming debt ceiling of $16.4 trillion, every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth—7 billion people total—would need to cough up around $2,400 to pay it off.
The fun doesn't stop there. Doing a quick search on the internet allows you to make all sorts of interesting visual comparisons between U.S. debt and random objects, whether that be the number of billion-dollar daily vacations you could take for the rest of your life, the amount of money spent since the birth of Jesus, or how many times a contiguous chain of 1 dollar bills would circle the earth (actually, I haven't seen that one yet).
Before we get to Milky Way galaxies however, here's a few images that I found showing the size of U.S. debt for 2011 in comparison to the statue of liberty, a footbal field and your averaged sized house in terms of $100 bills:
Source: https://usdebt.kleptocracy.us/
Or, in terms of the amount of money the U.S. owes in future unpaid commitments, referred to as "unfunded liabilities", here's a whopper using the previous World Trade towers as a comparison. Call it the "Paper Skyscraper" if you will. (BTW, the Statue of Liberty is that really small thing toward the bottom right...you may need to squint.)
Source: https://usdebt.kleptocracy.us/
And, lastly, given that scientists estimate there are anywhere between 200 and 400 billion stars in the Milky Way, if each star represents a dollar, then the amount of debt the U.S. will reach after next election comes out to somewhere between 41 and 82 Milky Way galaxies. Perhaps we do have a bright future after all!
These are the voyages of the United States Enterprise. To explore strange new worlds and seek out new civilizations to buy our debt, to boldly go where no nation has gone before.
CLICK HERE to access the broadcast and transcript for Jim Puplava's interview with Rick Santelli, "A Day of Reckoning Is Coming on the National Debt".
