Tuesday, June 5, 2007

yikes

Just a little bit of trivia to keep you from sleeping tonight.

The Outstanding Public Debt as of 06 Jun 2007 at 04:27:58 AM GMT is:

$8,833,288,357,133.74

That is 8.8 TRILLION dollars. That doesn't even sound like a real number. More like 32 Brazillion dollars. Seems like there is a bad bush joke that goes with Brazillion. Anyway.

Breaking down a trillion into more manageable numbers:

*The estimated population of the United States is 302,080,750 so each citizen's share of this debt is $29,241.48.

*Is roughly four times Britain’s GDP

*Equates to $1,500 for every man, woman and child in the world

*Would buy all the tea in China. In fact it would buy all the tea in the world for the next 2,000 years.

*Is enough to solve the Palestinian crisis by rehousing every Israeli and Palestinian family in a £1.5m detached house in Henley-on-Thames

*Would build 28 Eiffel Towers — constructed out of gold.

Thanks a lot Xavier *sigh* how am I going to sleep tonight????

That's not fair is it? All I did was find an old post on his site with these stats. But he didn't create the debt. Nope. Just called my attention to it.

The big TYVFM goes to Dubya.

..|..

8 comments:

Joe said...

I've said for at least 15 years that we're going to default on the Debt. And a cluster it will be when it happens. I hope I'm long dead by then.

Trelvix said...

Nah - no worries. We'll just come up with better stories of WMDs hidden dangerously in the capital cities of our lenders, declare the debts null and void, and continue thumbing our nose at the rest of the world with arrogance and myopia.

Our grandkids are going to be very pissed at us aren't they?

Toni said...

I agree with stinkbait, someday we will just have to find a reason to bomb the shit out of China, the sadest part is they have the ability to fight back.

Fiery said...

I am not looking forward to seeing how this whole debt fiasco plays out.

What worries me, is that there are so many things screwed up that I start to go numb after awhile.

I don't think numb is a good reaction to these disasters: national debt, the pseudo war on terror, political corruption, MK Ultra, the push for an american theocracy, fundamentalists, public school indoctrination, dumbing down of students, druging students to force cooperation....

The list just keeps going. I've only touched on a few that bother me. I'll bet everyone here could add 3 more topics not even mentioned yet.

The world is frelled and I feel like I owe my children an apology.

Now how the hell do we fix it?

King Aardvark said...

Just an engineering point:

Even if you're using a stronger alloy of gold so that it's not incredibly soft, you'd have a really hard time building an Eiffel Tower out of gold. The strength of gold is only about 1/3 of iron or steel.

Fiery said...

*snicker* you and my dad, King Aardvark. Never one to let a point slide. It's the perfectionist in you that makes you a good engineer isn't it?

:-)

King Aardvark said...

I wouldn't say I'm a good engineer. In fact, stay away from everything I've ever designed, just to be on the safe side...

Fiery said...

In the interest of public safety King A. maybe you should list all the structures with your special signature? That way we know where to invite our worst enemies?

"I hear the view is great from up there, will you get me a picture?"