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Flies, Poop and Incomprehensible Numbers
Comparing big numbers to help me wrap my head around the size of this debt… Dollar Bills on a football field: How tall would 33 trillion in $1 dollars bills stacked in the shape of a US football field be? Leaves on Trees How many leaves are on all of the trees in Louisiana? Ants and Flies in the United States How many red fire ants and flies are there in the U.S.? U.S. Manure production for a Year: How many pounds of agricultural manure was produced in the US last year? 5 Gallon Buckets of water from Lake Erie: Our smallest of Great Lakes by volume, Lake Erie, has how many buckets of water in it? Summary The enormity of this debt is staggering; if we built a skyscraper with it, most of the floors would lack oxygen. All the leaves of all the trees in Louisiana probably couldn't fake enough dollar bills to cover it, and if we collected the poop of every animal in the U.S. we could only offer a tablespoon to dollar trade. Selling every ant and fly in the country at a 1-dollar-per-critter rate might get us there, but the stench of irresponsibility that got us here would require draining the entirety of Lake Erie to even begin to start to clean the situation. Conclusion The only way out of a debt this size is a default, as there is no way that 167,000 tax payers can pay off $197,000 in additional taxes on an average income of $33,200 a year in a reasonable period of time. The fast version would be with a “debt Jubilee” event. The slow version would be with printing so many dollars that even though the debt is massive, the debt itself would become worth nothing because the dollar would become worth so little. Next time you think about the magnitude of this US debt number, I hope some of these numbers help give you a feel for the sheer size of this problem.
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