Letter: National debt truly astronomical

If we were to count a dollar every second, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, it would take 31,700 years to count a trillion dollars.

Our federal current federal debt is now nearly $30 trillion. If we use the same counting rate of a dollar every second, it would take nearly 840,000 years to count our national debt.

A dollar bill is 6 inches long. Our current federal debt of nearly $30 trillion would repeat the round trip from the Earth to the sun and back more than 14 times. Thus, our national debt can truly be called astronomical.

Even at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second), covering that distance would take nearly four hours.

Finally, to put it on a more personal level, if we divide our $30 trillion national debt by our 330 million population, each man, woman and child in the United States would owe more than $90,000. And each person’s individual debt in one-dollar bills would stretch nearly eight miles.

I don’t expect my calculations will affect the way our federal government appropriates and spends money. But when you pay your federal income tax, this information may give you a better grasp of the enormous amounts of money involved.