A quick look at US Unfunded Liabilities (debt, debt, and more debt)

in #life8 years ago

US Unfunded Liabilities (GAAP) total about $103 trillion (that's $103,000,000,000,000).

Now, I don't know how any person could look at that number and not know that there must be something seriously wrong, and unsustainable to such a degree that it will soon take more than a miracle to "fix".

Let's try to comprehend this number by looking at a few equivalencies:

Farm real estate is estimated at $3000 dollars per acre in the US.
If you took out a loan for 3,433,3333,333 acres of farmland, you'd rack up a debt of 103 trillion dollars.
That's 53,645,833 square miles.
North America is ~9,540,000 square miles.
South America is ~6,888,000 square miles.
The earth is roughly 200,000,000 square miles, so let's just say you'd have trouble finding that much farmland to buy...it would be a quarter of the Earth's surface area...

Quarter of the Earth

There are roughly 4 million miles of roads in the US, and it costs (on the low side) $4,000,000/mile to construct a 4-lane highway.
By these numbers, to construct 4 million miles of roads, it would cost $16,000,000,000,000.
You could construct the US road infrastructure 6 times and not reach the GAAP total!

Quarter of the Earth

The cost of a year of Harvard is roughly $60,000.
If you sent everyone in the United States to Harvard for 5 years, you could almost rack up a $103,000,000,000,000 debt.

To all those who don't see a problem with a GAAP six times greater than the US GDP, please help me understand how we could possibly get back on track to paying off what we owe.

And for those who fight to end the poisonous spending spree, keep going, we're facing an uphill battle.

Please share your thoughts!

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很厉害!你的思想很深!

This is a great article. I have been banging on about the DEBT problem for over 18 months. Was happy to share this on Twitter at stephenpkendal. Stephen.

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