A comedian explained what a trillion dollars was, and I used it in a blog. Sometimes these crazy numbers our government uses makes us just fog over. To understand a trillion, just pretend you started a business when Jesus Christ was born. You ran it so badly that you lost a million dollars a day. You continued to run the business right up to today losing that million dollars a day. Then your family continued to run the business with the same level of ineptitude for another 727.7 years. You now have amassed a deficit of One Trillion Dollars.
I saw a picture today of a bulletin board with the Fiscal Cliff information essentially as attached. I have retyped it, and have not researched it to see if it is 100% accurate. Unfortunately, it probably is close to accurate.
Here is the Fiscal Cliff put in a format that we all can understand:
Lesson #1
US Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
FED Budget: $3,820,000,000,000
New Debt: $1,650,000,000,000
National Debt: $14,271,000,000,000
Recent Budget Cuts: $38,500,000,000
Let’s now remove 8 zeros and pretend it’s a household budget:
Annual Family income: $21,700
Money the family spent: $38,200
New debt on the credit card: $16,500
Outstanding Balance on the credit card: $142,710
Total budget cuts so far: $38.50
Got it??...OK now,
Lesson #2
Here is another way to look at the debt ceiling:
Let’s say, You come home from work and find there has been a sewer backup in your neighborhood…and your home has sewage up to your ceilings. What do you think you should do? Raise the ceiling, or remove the mess?
Image courtesy of koratmember / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
