The old joke about spending in Washington goes, “You spend a million here, a billion there, and all of a sudden you’re talking about *real* money.”
When it gets into phrases like “billion” and “trillion” our brains just sort of freeze. The concepts are too big, too vast, too overwhelming.
Tell you what, though. Here’s a way to help grasp it.
You’d like to win a million dollars in the lottery, right? For most of us, that would pretty much set us up for life. Put most of it in the bank at four percent and make as much money off the interest as we take home now.
Right now, our national debt is increasing a million dollars about every twenty seconds… just about the time it took you to read this.