“$1.09 trillion - The U.S. federal deficit, which reached 13 digits for the first time and could grow to nearly $2 trillion by fall.”
On the surface this is just an interesting figure - something to fill the bottom of a page, but after reflecting three questions occurred to me, and because of them I can't write this off as insignificant. Join me on my journey of complete confusion.
1) Wait...what?!
This unprecedented event in United States financial history blithely states a debt that looks like this:
$1,000,000,000,000
That’s one thousand, billion dollars.
It’s an unfathomable number, but the tone of the quote in Time Magazine doesn’t try to convey how massive that figure is. It doesn’t make a parallel to what that amount of money can buy, or how an equal amount is being spent today. Luckily, the good people over at Mint.com have come up with a few ways to visualize it that I thought I’d share to horrify you with this figure of debt that we are calmly accepting as trivial.
and my personal favorite:
2) Wait...when?!
This staggering number – enough money to spend a dollar a second for the next 32,000 years – is expected to double in the next four months.
Take your time with that.
The national debt, which reached this catastrophic number for the first time in our history (a number that equals all government spending of the last 200 years combined), is expected to double in four months. Double. I’ll say it again, but...differently. It took us over 200 years to reach this horrifying debt, and we anticipate doubling it in a few more months.
The expectation of our economy somehow coping with a $2,000,000,000,000 national debt is an insight into the boundless capacity to delude ourselves into calmly accepting and hoping to cope with horrendous facts about everything - from our bodies, our environment, our future on this planet, and ourselves. We are numb to "stats", and narcotize ourselves to potentially destructive behavior. The wealth of millions of people on this planet is reduced to a phrase that we can ignore – 13 digits. Insane.
3) Wait...where?!
This “story” is only one sentence long and it’s buried at the bottom-right hand corner of the page. It’s presented as a piece of trivia; a novelty to look at and go, “hmmm…that’s wacky.” However, after taking a short look at what that figure indicates, and it's projected growth - like we just did -one would hope that this would be front page, international, earth-shaking news. Instead it's a quirky number fact at the bottom of page 15. This story, not just the number, but its relegation as a fun fact terrifies me to my soul. I'm happy I didn't read a full page story - I might have imploded.
Humanity's ability to delude itself is boundless. It must be, because even after reading things like this everyday, I'm here trying to stimulate change. Maybe I'm just as deluded to think that this post wasn't for an audience of one.
Maybe.
