How long will it take us to pay back $16 trillion in debt?
By Jenny Beth Martin, Jenny Beth Martin

Published September 07, 2012
FoxNews.com




Treasury Dept: US debt officially hits $16T

The Debt Clock Strikes $16 Trillion

Our Real National Debt
The US government has racked up $16 trillion in debt. The US debt is now bigger than the entire US economy. As reported in the Russian Times, “before President Obama took office, the debt was $9.6 trillion. During the [Obama] presidency, it has increased by $6.4 trillion – two-thirds of its 2008 amount. The current president [Obama] has overseen the largest debt explosion in US history.”

President Obama did more than oversee the largest debt explosion in US history. He overspent us into the largest debt explosion in US history.

To give you an idea of how bad this is, let’s take a look at just one of the $16 trillion dollars your family now owes, and what all that debt means to you and your family.

How much is a trillion dollars?

Few of us will see even a million dollars all at once in our lifetimes. Even fewer of us will see a billion. And no human being, in the history of the world has ever amassed a trillion dollars.

That is why, for most of us, a million dollars or a billion dollars are abstract concepts.

A trillion dollars is not an abstract concept for the US government. It intentionally overspends more than a trillion dollars each year of the Obama presidency. This year, the fourth year of the Obama presidency, is the fourth consecutive year that government has overspent by more than $1 trillion.

That's $1 trillion in new government overspending, on top of all the existing government programs, on top of Stimulus 1, after Stimulus 2, and after the government bailed out hundreds of banks, General Motors, Chrysler, AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (and, through them, more than 2/3 of US mortgages), after the Federal Reserve's "Quantitative Easing 1," after "Quantitative Easing 2," after the government took over the student loan industry, and after it rammed through “ObamaCare” against the will of the people; a massive government power-grab which, if not repealed, will cost another trillion and more, while giving control over more than one-sixth of the entire US economy to unelected bureaucrats in Washington.


“I place economy among the first and most important virtues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers to be feared…To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt…We must make our choice between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude...”
- Thomas Jefferson


After all that spending, on top of an already bloated and big-spending government, President Obama then overspent an additional $1 trillion in each year of his presidency. As reported in Forbes, “Simple math says that a $1.1 trillion deficit on a $3.8 trillion budget is ‘overspending’ by 40 percent.”

Let’s go back to the original question: how much is a trillion dollars? If you spent one dollar every second around the clock, it would take you 31,688 years to spend a trillion dollars.

The US government has overspent your money – not by $1 trillion, not by $2 trillion, $5 trillion or even $10 trillion. It has overspent your hard-earned money – and money not yet earned by your children and grandchildren – by $16 trillion.

You didn’t overspend the $16 trillion. Our government did. But you and your family are now on the hook for it all. So how long will it take you to pay for all of their overspending?

• To pay back one million dollars, at a rate of one dollar per second, would take you 11.5 days.
• To pay back one billion dollars, at a rate of one dollar per second, would take you 32 years.
• To pay back one trillion dollars, at a rate of one dollar per second, would take you 31,688 years.

The median American household income is about $50,000 per year. That translates to less than one tenth of one cent per second.

So, if your family earns $50,000 per year, and if you spend none of that on food, rent, transportation, income tax or even pursuing your own happiness, and if you take all of your family’s household income and use it — not to pay down the government’s current debt, but just to pay down the $1 trillion in new debt that the government overspends each year – it would take your family 32 million years to pay for it.

Now, multiply that by 16 – because the government is now $16 trillion in debt – to see how long it will take for you to pay it back.

That’s five hundred and twelve million years. Yes, 512,000,000 years.

That’s insane.

There has to be a return to sanity in Washington and the leaders the country elects this year much deal with the crisis and stop the spending. We cannot waste our future by never being able to pay back this insane debt.

Every family knows they cannot live outside its means and expect to survive. At some point you will have to pay the price. Likewise, if the country cannot do so, we, as a nation, will also pay the price.


Jenny Beth Martin is co-founder and national coordinator of Tea Party Patriots, a national grassroots organization with more than 3500 chapters.



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