Thursday, October 16, 2008

Sorry... I don't carry cash.

$53 trillion. That number is absolutely staggering, and it's the old number representing our national debt plus all the unfunded promises such as Social Security and Medicare, which have no future tax revenues to cover them. In additional, the FY2008/09 projected number for a $1 trillion budget deficit equates to almost 7.5% on the Gross Domestic Product. Now before you hock-loving types start bantering about the ratio of y to z is less than k on the third Sunday stuff, let's put it into terms we 'normal' everyday simple folk can relate.

In 2006, the US Census Bureau estimated there are 111,617,402 US households (+/- 145,530), so let's round to 111,500,000 for those of us mathematically challenged. Stay with me, here come a lot of zeros.

That's 53,000,000,000,000 divided by 111,500,000 which comes to...cancel the zeros, carry the 2...and...475,386.32....okay, rounded to 475,386. That's dollars. For each household. Wow.

Can I get a bailout?

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