- $14.1 trillion is the size of the entire U.S. Economy
- $53 trillion is the approximate size of the U.S. bill for Social Security and Medicare promises
In short, we’re insolvent. With a bill this large, there will be no money for anything else - infrastructure, security, military, you name it - every dollar we pay in taxes would go to funding Medicare and Social Security.
To make those numbers more digestible (since $53trillion is a hard number to get your mind around), from the article:
“A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 32 years. A trillion seconds is 32,000 years. And 53 trillion seconds? 1.7 million years.”
David Walker (former Comptroller General) says that these promises equate to an IOU of about $455,000 for every American household”.
The problem, as Beck so poignantly illustrates, is that none of this is news - the Government has known about it for a long time, and has done nothing but pass the buck to the next administration. And what about the American people? His illustration is that if an asteroid were heading toward earth by the tune of $53 trillion dollars, we’d demand something be done about it. But here we sit - who’s speaking out?
Throughout history, when the people stop getting involved, then things go awry - it’s only through ongoing intervention of we the people that keeps a government in check. So what am I proposing we do? At the very minimum, be aware, and talk about it. Perpetuate the conversation.
An elected government is a government that focuses on things that will get them re-elected. Those things that the people care and talk about the most, are those things that are bound to get the most attention.
