16 trillion bucks. That's how much we owe -- 16 trillion smackers.
My gosh, even if you were to spend a million dollars a day from the day Christ was born, you wouldn't be anywhere near a trillion bucks today. And this is more than 16 times that.
So just how big is $16 trillion?
Big enough to feed every one of the 77 million American households with a family for 187 years.
Big enough to pay for 6,400 NASA Curiosity missions to Mars.
Big enough to buy a half-million dollar house for 32 million Americans and a $53,000 car for every American.
Big enough to build more than a thousand Freedom Towers and fund the Department of Education -- if you wanted to -- for 207 years; or Medicare for 21 years or both Medicare and Social Security for 13 years.
Oh, what we could do with that dough, if we didn't owe that dough. If we didn't have to pay more than $227 billion just in interest costs carrying that dough every year.
Talk about money we could strategically invest.
But the harsh reality is we don't have that money to invest, strategically or otherwise. Not when we're too busy just paying the finance charges on that big old national Visa bill, just to keep our heads afloat.
That's why the debt clock matters. That's why this whole debt matters. It's strangling our resources and increasingly gobbling up all our resources.
It's the issue of our time because we're running out of money and we are clearly running out of time.
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