An interesting, if alarming, exercise is to watch the online U.S. Debt Clock, at www.usdebtclock.org.
It gives you, moment by moment, a fresh tally of just how much money the United States owes to a range of creditors foreign and domestic.
Keep a sharp lookout if you visit the site, though. The smaller figures in the debt tally -- those in the ones, tens, hundreds and even the thousands -- are impossible to track. They simply move too fast.
You have to get to the tens of thousands before you can see the numbers moving in a detectable order: 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.
It takes perhaps 15 or 20 seconds for the number in the hundreds of thousands position to change -- so as a nation we're spending roughly $100,000 every third or fourth of a minute.
The millions, billions and trillions move a bit slower, of course, but it won't be long at all before we cross from the current $14.98 trillion to the $15 trillion mark.
Yet the ongoing discussions on deficit cuts in Washington seem unlikely to produce more than some window-dressing and perhaps some cuts around the margins.
The debt mounts uncontrollably. The economic devastation that it threatens draws closer.
And many of our leaders in Washington don't seem to have time to deal with this crisis, because they are busy proposing even more spending.
That's an odd way to run a country, don't you think?