Your National Debt

So here is the budget poop. It's huge! People in Washington are spending money like drunken sailors on shore leave! Actually, sailors would probably spend less. Different websites use different methods to show why the federal budget creates this huge number called the Public Debt. This is a really big number $8,700,000,000,000.01 US dollars. This kind of freaked me out since I have less than that in my savings. So I can't bail the government out on my on.

Knowing there has to be a mistake somewhere, I looked it up on Wikipedia. There it is, yep it's big. So who started this deficit thing. Well, the chart started at 1900 and went trough 2005. There's been a public debt the whole time. The chart is in percentages which is a lot easier to type. The debt peaked in the late forties at 120% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the lowest was in about 1917 at 9% or so. In 2005 it was at 65% of GDP.

Not everybody uses the percentage of GDP for the charts. Some use dollars that may or may not be adjusted for inflation. When the chart is not adjusted for inflation the charts look scary as all hell. When adjusted for inflation the charts are scary, just not as much if they use 2000 or 2005 dollars. Since the charts start at the year 1900 or 1950 I would like to see the charts in the inflation adjusted dollars based on the beginning of the chart. For example, using a 1900 to 2006 chart range use the 1900 dollar and adjust the rest for inflation. Then the national debt is only $750,000,000,000.02 in 1900 dollars based on the salt pork index of inflation. This is still a lot of money.

So I hit the CIA website to see what's been going on. Per the CIA, the GDP is $43,000.00 per capita. So the national debt is $27,950.00 per capita (that appears to be based on 2006 dollars). This is a big number, but a lot easier to type. You just have to remember to multiply by 300 million for the really big number. Then there was another weird thing I read on Wikipedia. That was that the national debt was 4.9 trillion? That number was there because 3.8 trillion of the debt was Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. That may mean that $15741.00 is debt and $12209.00 is something else that might be debt unless you are getting Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid, per capita.

Then I tried another site and must have hit a wrong button. The debt number on this site was 37 trillion dollars. I know that the public debt is growing, but not that fast! Well, this guy added national debt, state debt and personal debt. Then he figured the per capita total debt is a little over $125,000.00 dollars.

This guy, Micheal W. Hodges at financial sense.com went on with estimates and contingencies that made the number bigger. So I stopped there because my head was hurting and then noticed the article was dated 2004. That meant the debt per capita had to be more. So by now that the average American owes in the neighborhood of $175,000.00 a head.

With that number, the per capita share of the national debt is only 16% of your total debt and even less at 9% if you are getting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Now things are more in perspective! We could start measuring the national debt as a percentage of the total per capita debt. Then the numbers aren't so scary. Unless you happen to realize that the average American is in debt up to his/her eyeballs.

This does get me an idea though. It could be time for a little financial counseling. You know consolidate everything and cut up the credit cards. Then all we have to do is get 300,000,000 debt consolidation loans from a Iranian bank and the problem is solved. Until new credit cards show up in the mail.