So. You won yourself a trip to Tokyo. You drive to your airport in Salt Lake City, check your bags, and eventually get on the plane. But as you take off you notice something strange outside the window. There seems to be this...something...some kind of straight line guiding your path. You ask a flight attendant about it, and she says, "Oh, that's the money stack." Money stack? You're too embarassed to admit that you don't know what that is, so you don't ask again. But every time you check out your window, it's still there. It does look like a stack of money, but the stack seems to have fallen over so it's laying on its side. You consider the implications of a stack of $1 bills that, when laid on its side, stretches from Salt Lake City to Tokyo. When you get off the plane, and into Tokyo, you ask your cab driver (whose English is decent) to take you to the money stack so you can get a closer look. You're stunned to find out that this stack is not made of $1 bills. It's made of $100 bills.
A stack of $100 bills laid on its side, stretching from Salt Lake City to Tokyo. That's about how much money it would take to pay off the U.S. national debt. We throw around words like millionaire (a stack of $100's the height of a child) and billionaire (a stack the height of 3 Sears Towers) without really understanding how big those numbers are.
Now, I know that the national debt is not as big as it has been at other times in our past if you take it as fraction of our national income (GDP). And I also know that there are economic advantages to borrowing money instead of taxing citizens to pay as we go. But it is a bit intimidating to know the size of that number. It's a stack of $100 bills a little over an inch high for every citizen of the country. An inch doesn't seem like much, but a half a foot of $100's for a family of 5...let's just say I wouldn't want to be called on to contribute a family's share all at once to pay it off.
And all politics aside, big numbers are pretty cool.
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