Letter to the Editor: Reality check, the real state of our nation

Talk about it

I don’t think the average person can really comprehend the financial situation that we as a country have gotten ourselves into. They don’t talk much about millions of dollars anymore, and billions of dollars are no longer a big deal. Now they deal in trillions of dollars! Can we really comprehend what a trillion dollars is? Here is an example that may help:

If you could get $1 each second of your life, that would be $3,600 each hour, or $86,400 per day, or nearly $31.6 million per year. It would take you 31,710 years to get $1 trillion dollars.

Or if you could get $31,710 per second, that would be nearly $114.16 million per hour, or nearly $2.74 billion per day. That would actually come to $1 trillion dollars in a year!

Last year our nation spent $3.5 trillion dollars and that was $1.3 trillion more than we took in! Our government spent $110,985 per second, or nearly $399.55 million per hour! That’s almost $9.59 billion per day!

These so-called huge automatic cuts they are talking about would amount to less than nine days of our government’s abnormal spending, and we’d still be spending more this year than we did last year. Yet, if you listen to the news, they make it sound like the world will come to an end if the government actually makes these cuts. We all let them by with this because these numbers are so hard, if not impossible, for us to understand.

I’ll try to bring it down to a family living budget perspective. If we compare our government’s annual spending to a $50,000 family living budget, the cuts they are talking about would be equal to $1,200 of cuts. But that’s not out of the $50,000 we spent last year because we were planning on spending $52,857 next year. So, after the $1,200 drastic cut, we’re still planning on spending $51,657. The big problem with all this is that we’ve only been making $34,286 each year and now we owe $237,143 and at the rate we’re going, we’ll owe $614,286 or more in 10 years.

In this case I hope our family banker keeps our interest rate low because if he charges us 5.6 percent interest on our debt, it’ll take all of our income just to pay the interest. That help?

Have a great day!

Jim Erickson,

New England

Tags: opinion