Five years is a long time, children

It’s how long I’ve been blogging, as of three days ago.

1,827 days (including two extra for leap years 2008 and 2012).

43,848 hours.

2,630,880 minutes.

157,852,800 seconds.

And if you had been paying down our national debt of around $16 trillion at the rate of one dollar per second during that entire time, what would you have?

I’ll tell you what you would have. Children, you would have 101359.25461695959780250967990432 more five-year periods to go before our current national debt would be paid off, that’s what you would have.

But if you were rich, richer even than Mr. Romney, and had been able to pay $100 per second instead of that one measly dollar, you would have paid $15,785,280,000 during the past five years and only 1012.60254616959597802509667990432 more five-year periods to go before our current national debt will be paid off.

I just thought you’d like to know for budget-planning purposes.

But here’s the kicker. If every last one of the 311,000,000 Americans had paid down our national debt of $16 trillion at the rate of one dollar per second during the last five years, we would have raised $49,065,350,400,000,000 by now. That’s $49 quadrillion, children, way more than our national debt. Even more than Michelle Obama spends on clothes.

Isn’t it amazing what we can do when we all work together?

This whole exercise is predicated on each American having $157,766,400 with which to have been paying down the national debt during the last five years.

There’s a fly in every ointment.

[Editor’s note. These calculations do not appear to be correct if you are a resident of a British Commonwealth of Nations country, where what we call a billion you call a thousand million and what we call a trillion you call a billion, and so on. --RWP]