Picturing the National Debt

The website http://usdebt.kleptocracy.us/ has created a series of graphic images of what our current and future national debt looks like. I highly recommend taking a look at it. It helps one understand what is facing us or, more accurately, our children, if we do not get our national spending under control.


One hundred million dollars, stacked, would be a pallet-load on a standard shipping pallet. It would stand about chest high on an average size man. Still, it is a trifle compared to our debt.

One billion dollars would require ten $100,000,000 pallets. Although more impressive, it is still a drop in the bucket.

Now, take 20,000 of those $100,000,000 pallets and stack them double-high. To equal a trillion dollars, you would fill a football field with double-stacked pallets. In 2010, the U.S. government racked up a deficit of $1.7 trillion or one-and-a-half football fields of double-stacked pallets.

The total national debt for 2011 is projected to total $15 trillion, "20% of the entire world's combined GDP (Gross Domestic Product)" and more than 100% of the value of all goods and services (GDP) produced in our country. To equal $15 trillion, take these $100,000,000 pallets and stack them 60 pallets high, and then fill two football fields with these 60-pallet stacks. If the Statue of Liberty was placed next to the them, the stacks would reach chest-high on Lady Liberty.

Now, if you are not depressed and distressed enough, take a look at our nation's unfunded liabilities. To fully fund the Medicare, Medicare Prescription Drug, Social Security, Military and federal civil servant pension plans as currently structured would require -- are you ready? -- $114.5 trillion dollars. (This figure does not include Obamacare, by the way.) A single layer of our double-stacked pallets would equal $1 trillion dollars so the total would soar to 114-1/2 layers high, well over the tops of the fallen World Trade Center towers, almost three-quarters higher than the Empire State building, and higher than the 1,976-story Freedom Tower under-construction at Ground Zero. That is how much $114,500,000,000,000 is.

It is easy to depersonalize these numbers. We say, it is the government's debt or it is owed to others, such as China and other countries. Some say the national debt does not concern or effect them. Well, these facts may surprise you:

Who is the government? "We the People of the United States" are the Constitution's first words. The U.S. government is not some disembodied entity. It is you and me together; we are the government. Thus, the national debt is our debt. We owe it. And, it may surprise you, but most of it -- about 86 percent -- is owed, not to other nations, but to ourselves. Government agencies borrow and lend to one another. In other words, we take money from one of our hands and give it to the other.

For example, you have probably heard about the "Social Security Trust Fund." The naive think this is some kind of special savings account set up by the government to protect the funds received from our paycheck withholdings until they are needed when we retire. The sad truth is all of those funds -- every single dollar of it -- has been lent back to the federal government to be included in the general revenues used to pay all the government's bills. It is not reserved to pay just Social Security claims, as many falsely believe. The so-called Social Security Trust Fund is just a stack of IOU's (government bonds) from the U.S. Treasury. These bonds are a promise to you that you will pay yourself back sometime in the future when you need the funds. The same is true for most of the other unfunded retirement promises owed to veterans and federal pensioners. Can you spell P-O-N-Z-I scheme?

For additional information, go to www.USdebtclock.org.