42 • MARTIN H. RUBY
How Are You Going to Pay Off All That Debt? The government is in trouble.
The federal debt is rising and rising. In the last chapter, we talked about how this was a good incentive for the government to keep interest rates low. It’s also a good incentive for the govern- ment to raise taxes. How bad is it? In 2013, analysts were excited that the federal deficit that year would be the first deficit in five years to increase by less than $1 trillion. 11 It was considered great news that our deficit was only going to grow by $1 trillion. One TRILLION dollars. A one with 12 zeroes: $1,000,000,000,000. Twenty years ago, no one even spoke in terms of trillions. That wasn’t even a unit of measurement most people knew. Billions used to be a mind-blowing amount of debt. And now we measure in trillions! Here’s how big a trillion really is, perfectly summed up on the blog “Thoughts You Should Know”: 12 “A trillion dollars is so large a number that only politicians can use the term in conversation... probably because they seldom think about what they are really saying. I've read that mathematicians do not even use the term trillion! “Here is some perspective on TRILLION: the country has not existed for a trillion seconds. Western civilization has not been around a trillion
11 Congressional Budget Office. Feb. 5, 2013. “The Budget and Economic Outlook: Fis- cal Years 2013 to 2023.” http: // www.cbo.gov / publication / 43907. 12 Thought You Should Know News. “What’s the difference between a million, a bil- lion, a trillion?” http: // www.tysknews.com / Depts / Taxes / million.htm.
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