Doing the math

This from a reader:

The White House just estimated the national debt could grow 9 trillion dollars over the next ten years. I don’t know about you but a trillion of anything is just too big for me to understand – I have to work with smaller numbers. Something like this…. let’s assume you could spend $100 a second - that would be $6000 a minute, $360,000 an hour and $8,640,000 a day. At that rate, it takes about 116 days to spend a billion dollars – unless of course you’re a government agency and then you can do it a lot faster.

If we continue along that same path, at $100 per second, how long would it take to spend one trillion dollars? If you’re not shocked by the answer, you’re not doing the math right. Turns out to be something like 317 years – yes, that is right – years! Should we be worried about this?