Dear God in Heaven, That is a Huge Number

This kind of took my breath away this morning.

The United States of America now owes someone(s) $13,665,000,000,000.

By 2012, when Hillary Clinton next challenges Barack Obama for their party’s presidential nomination, the national debt will be even larger than today’s record — $16,500,000,000,000, according to current federal estimates. That’s more money than the entire United States economy produces in a complete year.

That’s also way more money than either Obama or Clinton spent to win the Democratic nomination in 2008.

This stunning debt news comes to us courtesy of Mark Knoller of CBS News, who is the White House press corps’ chief cruncher of all things numbers.

Knoller has also figured out that during Obama’s presidential watch, the national debt has increased by $3,039,000,000,000, as in, that much more than it was when he took the oath on Jan. 20, 2009, in front of millions of excited witnesses and Aretha Franklin’s huge hat.

I don’t have a good mental picture for how much money that is. In the middle of this year, the real value of all our good and services, our Gross Domestic Product, was a touch over 14.5 trillion dollars. So, the debt piled up during just the Obama administration was 20 percent of everything that all of us have produced so far this year. In other words, take two and a half months of all the work you’ve done so far and throw it out the window because it belongs to someone else. That is the obligation under which our government has put us, our children, and grandchildren.

If we took our entire GDP and paid off the debt, we’d be left with 835 billion dollars. That’s roughly the GDP of South Korea and just a little less than the GDP of Mexico, our drug war-wracked, dysfucntional, population-bleeding neighbors to our south.

Is that really where we want to be? Do we really want to be so encumbered with debt that our free and clear productivity puts us behind Mexico?

Right now, the President and his progressive buddies in Congress and the MSM have no desire at all to stop spending our money. Two and a half months is simply not enough to them. They want more. They need more. Their worldview simply can not exist until every single productive second of our lives belongs to them, to distribute as they see fit, because they’re smarter and more enlightened than us.

It is not difficult to see where their plans lead. We only have to look at the other places where progressive economic policies have been given free reign: North Korea, Russia, Cuba, and much of Central America. Who cares if the peasants get enough food so long as the people running the show have plenty? In the end, that’s where we’re headed if we don’t get control of our government again.

UPDATE: Billion, trillion, what’s the difference anymore? I corrected the errant number at the GDP link, which should have read trillion.

Other Posts of Interest:

• Obama Stars in New Movie: For a Trillion Dollars More
• “It is never a bad time for Republicans to speak economic truth…”
• No More Money for Highways.

Tags: Big Government, Progressives

Category: The Economy and Your Money