Time magazine recently reported that the national debt is now at a staggering $9.13 trillion, up from $5.7 trillion when President Bush was sworn into office in 2001. Also mentioned in the article was that our national debt not only grows at a rate of $1 million per minute, but it would also take $30,000 from every individual in the United States just to pay it off.
Obviously this news hit me hard when I read it in the briefing section of my weekly Time magazine, but it's even worse knowing that we're the generation that's going to have to deal with this mess.
When I think about every U.S. citizen in the world having to pay such a large amount of money just for us to break even, it almost makes me want to freak out and yell loud noises.
I mean, $30,000 is a lot of money. For that kind of money I could buy round-trip tickets for me and eight of my closest friends to visit Dalandzadgad, Mongolia. If I didn't feel like traveling, I could buy 12,552 bacon, egg and cheese biscuits from McDonald's or 1500 subscriptions to Bird Watcher's Digest.
I could buy a used ice cream truck and stock it with thousands of orange-flavored Flintstones push-ups.
I could buy 454 "I love speed dating" T-shirts, 772 pairs of neon green knee pads and 2,525 cans of Spam: Hot and Spicy with Tabasco sauce.
If the mood really struck me I could spend my $30,000 on eight different Rocky and Bullwinkle pinball machines and place them in every room of my house, including the bathroom.
I could buy the world's biggest hoagie, or 23,255 boxes of Kraft macaroni and cheese.
I could go on a hot air balloon ride for 60 hours and tour the rich scenery of the lovely state of Connecticut, or buy 555 green iguanas and let them run wild in my basement.
Unfortunately, with each passing minute, our debt grows larger. With wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the dwindling value of the U.S. dollar, there is only one thing to do: take our $30,000 and spend it on Chinese language lessons.
