The two hardest things about vacations are getting ready to go and the re-entry when you return, like diving into the deep end of a very cold swimming pool. Making it even harder in this late Summer of Screaming TownMeetings and televised HealthCare Dueling is to digest the news that our national deficit is now projected to reach 9 Trillion (with a “T”) dollars over the next decade.
You see, they apparently had it reliably pegged at a mere 7 Trillion (with a “T”), and then some federal BeanCounters re-tallied the list and came up with a couple of Trillion that they had overlooked (nobody’s perfect!), to be added to this staggering total.
At the end of last week, world bankers had hunkered down at Jackson Hole to collectively announce that the worst from our economic meltdown since Dec. 2007 is now over – that’s the good news. They also announced – Ben Bernancke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, that is – while happy days are not quite here again; not with high unemployment projected for at least another year, that home sales indeed are picking up (if you can pick through the foreclosed properties, that is) and that Wall Street has gone so nuts again that some have announced the birth of another Bull market as the Dow crossed the 9500 mark, still well below its heights of some 14,000 not long ago.
But into every sunny day a little rain must fall and that cloud on the horizon is the announcement that (maybe by the time you read this) White House budget estimates will come out next week. Oh yes, administration officials indicated that their earlier 10-year deficit estimate, a mere, throat-gagging, $7 Trillion (with a “T”) dollars; well, that was just a wee bit on the low side. $9 Trillion will be the new number instead. Nine Trillion Dollars – with a “T.” If there are soon to be 300 million Americans, that is $30,000 dollars for you, your son, my son, and me etc., on down the line.
The magnitude of the number cannot be easily understood.
If you would like to be precise, and these are slightly different measures, the National Debt Clock has an $11, 731,810,442,965.35 total debt as of this past weekend – they figure the estimated population of the United States is 306,787,552, and they calculate precisely that
each citizen’s share of this debt is $38,240.83. Adding further insult to injury to your wallet and mine, they further state that the National Debt has continued to increase an average of $3.92 billion per day since September 28, 2007. Why, that makes even Brett Favre’s seemingly perennial, come-back from retirement, salary for the Minnesota Vikings seem like beer money.
WikiAnswers both asks and answers the following: Q: “If you had been given 1 trillion of today’s dollars at the beginning of year 1 in history and spent 1 million per day, in what year would you have spent the 1 trillion?” — A: “the millionth day.” To make that real, counting back a million days from present, brings us back to about 739 B.C. – you might wonder what was happening back then on the world’s stage (the time that we began spending a million dollars each day in order to spend an entire trillion dollars by the time you read this) – headlines then would have read (assuming there were headlines and people could read them):
Hoshea becomes the last king of Israel (732 B.C.);
Northern Egypt ceases to be ruled by Libyan pharaohs. (730 B.C.).
That’s just 1 Trillion. The nine Trillion we face would have allowed us to spend one million dollars per day for nine million days, or, 24,657 years— Paleolithic cave paintings found at what is called the ‘Sandy Creek 2’ rock shelter in Queensland, Australia, have been dated to about 24,000 years ago.
Forget about mortgaging our kids’ futures, or their kids’ futures, or their kids’ or theirs. Don’t even ask how much the annual debt service is on nine Trillion dollars.
Sen. Everett Dirksen, famously said in cautioning of uncontrolled federal spending, “A billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” But, Dirksen also said:
“I know how easy it is to say, ‘Oh, it is only $20,000,000,’ or, ‘it is only $80,000,000,”’or ‘it is only $240,000,000’ a year that will be taken out of the pockets of the taxpayer.’ But where will it finally stop? I do not know. An old man once taught me what a million is. He said, ‘Look at your watch, and watch the second hand. You can see it every second, every minute, every day, every night, every week, every month, every year – and in 3 years it would go around 1,000,000 times.’” [Congressional Record, March 15, 1951, p. 2479]
And, to conclude with some perspective on how the deficit and our national debt have grown exponentially during our lifetimes, Dirksen also said during the year that Roger Maris hit 61 home runs and shattered the Babe’s record: ““A hundred million dollars, Mr. President, is only a ‘drop in the bucket.’ I grew up at a time when on Sunday, if I had been a good boy for the whole week, my mother gave me a penny and said to me, ‘My son, don’t spend it all in one place.’ . . . We have come a long way from then. The classic example is here tonight, when the Senator from Colorado says a hundred million dollars is ‘a drop in the bucket.’ . . . No wonder we are nursing a $295 billion debt.” [Congressional Record, June 8, 1961, p.9896] (Emphasis added). Kind of makes you nostalgic for that kind of debt today, no?