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TRILLIONS!
Holy Crap! I didn't have a good opener and wanted your immediate attention. Also, my brain hurts! Yes, my exploding head is trying to wrap itself around what is a trillion. Try it, then take 2 aspirins, drink plenty of liquids and wake up on another planet tomorrow, just don't call! This is when the drama starts. The reason being, quite frankly, we are in a whole 'nother galaxy concerning America's staggering national debt that is approaching 20 trillion dollars!! That's trillion for those of you that have passed out temporarily. . .
Ok, to fathom this number and lend some relativity to this unbelievably insane amount here is an historic timeline. 3200 hundred years ago the ancient Sumerians left behind a written record in the form cuneiform clay tablets. It's postulated that the original Sumerian writing began as a system of record keeping. It laid the foundation for many other cultures writing and as writing evolved it unfortunately became extinct in the second century A.D. Along with it, the knowledge for deciphering the text was lost. Time marched on.
About a half to two million cuneiform tablets have been discovered. One million seconds ago is 12 days and two million seconds ago would be roughly almost a month, around 24 days. It took scholars all the way up to the 19th century, somewhere in the middle to late 1850's to get a handle on what the ancients were trying to communicate. Interestingly, it is now believed that these were records of checks and balances for trading. This brings up a side bar debt. Let's fast forward to 2016 where it was reported that America had a trade deficit of 502 billion dollars. Now, 1 billion seconds is 31 years ago. Doing the math, 502 billion dollars [Converting dollars to time] would be 15,500 years ago. That is 12,300 years before recorded history.
An interesting coincidence on the above comparison, is an archaeological dig from Texas A&M University found artifacts that places humans in America 15,500 years ago in Texas and reported this in the journal Science in 2011. Yes, Texas, it had to be Texas, because let's face it, we all know Texas could be its own country and we respect that. According to Texas A&M University, this is the only "credible" site in North America where tools were found, blades, scrappers a "mobile took kit" if you will, and reference was also made to finding "the Holy Grail!" Hallelujah! Everything is bigger in Texas! Because there are no written records, we can only conjecture they were making stuff, albeit the "tools", and had trading partners. I think we could, tongue in cheek, with the absence of any records, blame Texas for perhaps the beginning of trade deficits. We would of course wait for the expert opinions on that subject. Just keep that in the back of your minds.
What is a trade deficit you ask? According to Investopedia.com a "trade deficit is an economic measure of a negative balance of trade in which a country's imports exceeds its exports. A trade deficit represents an outflow of domestic currency to foreign markets." Is this deficit due to just choosing the wrong trade partners? I wonder if the clay cuneiform tablets of 3200 years ago showed any deficits. That news has not leaked out to my knowledge anywhere throughout history. Fast forward to our modern reporting and it would be a breaking newsflash: "This just in, according to experts the cuneiform tablets are now thought to be a record of ancient trade deficits. Evidently this phenomenon has been going on since the beginning of recorded history!" Yep, we're all in this together folks apparently since the beginning of humans engaging in trade. Finally, we can blame history for our financial troubles. "Well, that's the way it's always been, who are we to try to change it now?" Eraser phrases, the final acceptance.
What is the national debt? The nearly 20 trillion dollars of the national debt is a debt that is public and intergovernmental owed by the federal government, so pay attention for those still following.
Let's continue on to just what exactly is a trillion, dollars to time. One trillion seconds is 31,709 point blah blah years ago when there was no written or recorded history. We can use astrophysics theory for a deeper perspective as well. A light year, which really hasn't been "measured", is the measurement that it takes to travel between two points in space in one earth year of 365 days. According to NASA (never a straight answer) that is 6 trillion miles (actually a little less, 5 trillion something rounded up to 6 trillion). Working eight hours per day at a rate of one number per second it would take two hundred thousand years to get to almost 6 trillion!
A trillion is a thousand billion and a billion is a thousand million. Think of seconds to dollars. I million seconds is 12 days ago. I billion seconds is 31 years ago. I trillion seconds is that number in the above paragraph, 31,709. . . It's easy now to realize that our trade deficit and national debt is truly "out of this world". It looks like the trade deficit of 502 billion and the national debt of nearly 20 trillion dollars has piled up substantially. Yet, according to some brainiacs the national debt is manageable as long as we eventually get long-term entitlement spending under control. Notwithstanding, on the trade deficit according to Forbes, my Scottish clan relative, we have "41 straight years of trade deficits yet America still stands strong." Perhaps we shouldn't be allowed to have any money since historically it has never been handled properly or used intelligently except for creating it.
I think we need to go back to Old Testament times, back before anyone was contemplating billions much less trillions and just take a goat out to the edge of DC (a.k.a the village) put all our "debt" on it then kill it. Done and exonerated. Gosh times were simpler back then and you could get on with worrying about climate change and if you had enough food stored up before a drought, flood or earthquake happened.
Evidentially, nothing needs fixed because all our debt, national and trade have no real records or even value not to mention how it all came into existence. Except, for the usual head in the sand responses, don't pay any attention to the man behind the curtain, shell games and my personal favorites, ink and paper. It's all quite manageable so return to your television shows and games there is nothing to worry about.
In closing, this author suggests strongly (and NASA may be working on this as I write, we probably wouldn't be informed though) that we might need to start thinking about forming outer space alien partnerships just in case things blow up here on planet Earth. Obviously we know how to calculate long galactic distances. It seems we are completely capable of playing with very large numbers and that is sure to impress our new highly advanced alien trade partners amongst the 300 billion other galaxies in the Universe. Three hundred billion? Our debts are larger than the number of galaxies, the ones we know of so far. Who knows, tomorrow we could wake up and a trillion galaxies could be discovered. Try to keep an open mind and know multiple billions is very, very big. However, a multiple trillions of anything is huuuge!
Author: Jade Anjoun - 2017
The Blissful Raven.com
Author's Note:
In September 2017, Trump signed a bill that raised the debt ceiling. On that same day, the national debt reached
$20 trillion+ for the first time in the country's history
UPDATE: The U.S. national debt hit a new high of $28 trillion in March 2021.
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