JeanRicard

When you total up all forms of debt including government debt, business debt, mortgage debt and consumer debt, we are 59.4 trillion dollars in debt.

But what does that mean, really? People rarely seem to have any clue just how much money a trillion dollars really is. There have been visualizations of that money, such as what follows

But when you look at the size and scope of that paper money, you likely think “so what? what’s the big deal?” So let’s measure the entire national debt in terms of something else, in terms of time and the human life and labor which currently represents the value of the debt.

The 2011 Median Income of US households was $50,054 per annum.[16] Let’s assume that its earned by two people, so that the average earner is making $25,027 per year. The average American works 34.5 hours per week throughout a whole year. 34.5 hours x 52 weeks = 1794 hours in a year. If we divide $25,027 by 1794 annual hours, we get a wage of about $14.00/hr (13.95, but I’m going to round up for simplicity).

The U.S. debt is $59,400,000,000,000.00 dollars.

At $14.00/hr, it would take a total of 4,242,587,142,857 hours. Over four trillion hours of work. There are 8765.8 hours in a year.

All of those hours amount to 484,023,950 years. Four hundred and eighty-four million years of labor at in order to pay off the national debt. The United States has an average life expectancy (men and women) of 79.8 years.

It would take a little more than 6 million human lifetimes from birth until death, working 24 hours a day (assuming it were even possible) at $14.00/hr to pay off the current national debt. Keep in mind their combined 79.8 years worth of labor would only pay off the $59.4 trillion we currently owe, and not anything accumulated during their hypothetical servitude.

Now image building 5600, 60,000 seat stadiums with a seat for everyone.  To buy your seat and pay it off with, lets say, a 30y 4% mortgage it would cost you $889/month+taxes, for a family of 3 more, do the math. To just rent and pay the interest it would cost $620+any profit the management wants, but you never own a seat at the game.