Probably few people have actually seen a billion dollars. It’s a number so staggering that it’s hard, really, to get one’s mind around it.
But a creative teacher at a high school in Snohomish, Wash., came up with a novel way to help his students understand our more than $14.3 trillion national debt.
He told the students to start collecting pennies. Each penny would represent $1 billion of the debt owed by the United States – meaning us taxpayers.
So the students started collecting the pennies. When they had enough, they made a big display of the coins in the cafeteria.
The grand total? It took 14,352 pennies – each one representing $1 billion, remember – to reflect our total national debt.
Of course, in the week or so since the display was placed in the cafeteria, the debt has continued growing at a rate of about $4 billion per day.
Now that we have some idea of just how severe our debt problem is, do we propose to do something about it? Or would we rather let the debt keep increasing and consuming a larger and larger share of our national output?
We know that wild spending got us into this crisis. Shouldn’t we recognize that less spending – not more taxing – is the way out?