National Debt by the numbers: What does 12 trillion mean?

On Friday afternoon with no media present, President Barack Obama signed a bill which raises our public debt from $12 .394 trillion to $14.294 trillion.

---

That is an incredible amount of money, but do Americans even grasp how much money $1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) is, let alone more than 14 trillion? A million seconds ago, it was only twelve days ago. But a trillion seconds ago -- it was 29678 B.C.. Woolly mammoths still roamed the earth, and the Great Lakes won't be formed for another 20,000 years. Scientists estimate that there aren't even one trillion stars in our galaxy (only 200 to 400 billion). Lined up end to end, one trillion dollar bills would circle the earth an incredible 380 times. But our debt has already surpassed $12 trillion. That's 13 million tons of one-dollar bills. In order to haul off all that cash, you would need more than 100,000 semi trucks. If we laid $12 trillion one-dollar bills side-by-side and end-to-end, we could pave all U.S. highways, streets, and county roads more than twice. The website Defeat the Debt provides figures like those that put debt levels in understandable perspectives. If I spent $1 billion a day, it would take just under 34 years of spending to reach the level of our national debt. Yet our federal government takes in trillions of dollars in revenue each year, and they still managed to run up a deficit this massive. Our national debt wasn't always so spectacular: only in 1982 did government break the $1 trillion mark. By 1990, the debt was $3.2 trillion. By 2000, it was $5.6. On Sept. 30, 2008, White House documents show that our public debt was $9.9 trillion. But in a matter of just a few months under the Obama administration, our debt has climbed by three trillion dollars. Bear in mind that it took over 200 years for the U.S. to accumulate one trillion dollars of debt. During that time we paid for one revolution, the Louisiana Purchase, a civil war, two world wars, the Great Depression, the Marshall Plan, numerous other conflicts, the space program, and so on. But in a matter of months, our federal government -- despite trillions of dollars in tax revenue each year -- has accumulated almost three trillion more? And all of this money being spent by government will have to be paid back by the American taxpayer. According to USDebtClock.org, as this column went to press, the current share for each taxpayer was over $113,000. The bill signed on Friday by Obama states that any new spending must be paid for either through spending cuts or tax hikes. And which do you think the Obama administration and Congress will choose? Our society simply cannot endure federal spending of this magnitude. Rather than argue over which political party or administration is to blame, we must work together to reverse this trend immediately, before it's too late. [Originally published at The US Report]