I read this morning that the national debt is 39 trillion dollars. That doesn’t sound so bad when you say it fast – but there are a lot of zeroes in a trillion. And zeroes can be important. A trillion has 12 zeroes – so we’re looking at 39,000,000,000,000. The number is too big for me to have a feel for, so let’s personalize it. The US Population is estimated at 349 million – that’s 349,000,000 – 349 followed by six zeroes.
So I’m figuring out my share. The first step is canceling out six zeroes. 349 people owe 39,000,000. Now I am getting into comprehensible numbers. I’ll round the 349 up to 350, round the 39 to 40, and cancel one more zero – 35 people owe almost 4 million dollars. Now I’m getting close to an approximation – 4 people (well, 3 1/2, but it’s kinder to round up than go full King Solomon) owe about $400,000. My share of the national debt is somewhere on the close order of $115,000. My wife’s share is the same. So is my one-year old grandson’s.
So I google and the first number that comes back to me is an average American net worth of $124,041 in 2024. Another answer comes back that the typical American household has a net worth of $193,000.
Without doing a lot more calculating, I think the bottom line is fairly obvious – it will take somewhere around all of America’s privately held wealth to pay off our collective public national debt. The total US household debt is about 21 trillion – a little over half the federal debt. The hypothetical US household debt is about $60,000 each.
My neighbors know that without doing the math – that uncalculated obligation of public debt is one part of the reasons that school bonds don’t pass. If it’s going to take 100% of the private wealth to pay off the national debt, it’s going to be hard to get the taxpayer to vote for any additional local public debt.
I’m a westerner, so I think in terms of land as well as dollars. The federal government has about 640 million acres of land. Personally, I like public lands – yet I fear that those bastards in DC have spent so much money the nation didn’t have that we’re going to have to look at biting the bullet and selling public land. I just don’t see any other cash-equivalent assets. If you have a better solution, let me know.
For all of my lifetime, we have had more government than we could afford – and it is definitely time to figure out how to pay the piper. Let’s get some idea of what selling public land might bring – and it’s going to be a lot less than our national debt.
We’re still looking at a dozen zeroes for a trillion – and our federal lands are 640,000,000 acres. Count the zeroes – if we assume that Federal lands will average a thousand dollars per acre (and I have spent time driving across the southwest) we’re only adding three more zeroes. Gives us a total of ten zeroes where we need twelve. It looks like there isn’t enough federal land to offset the debt.
Nothing personal, but if I can work this out without resorting to a spreadsheet and a computer, what sort of jackasses have we been electing to Congress?
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