As Congress considers issues like the “Big Beautiful Bill,” it becomes prosaic to talk about a trillion dollars for this, another trillion for that. It’s kind of like the 1960s, when Senator Everett Dirksen is alleged to have said, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” Frankly, I have a hard time imagining either circumstance. I mean, a billion dollars is a thousand million bucks, and a trillion dollars is a thousand billion greenbacks.
Our national debt is now counted in tens of trillions. But to get some perspective on this, try to imagine a Big Beautiful Car parked in your driveway. That’s OUR car, but it’s bigger than that airplane that was given to us by our Qatari buddies, and it has been carved from that “diamond as big as the Ritz” about which F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his 1922 short story collection, “Tales of the Jazz Age.” If you had to pay cash for your share of that fantastic diamond automobile, every member of your family would have to come up with about $108,000. So, if you have a family of four, collectively you owe $432,000.
Of course, you didn’t order the car. You’d have to be crazy to buy a tiny share in a vehicle for basic transportation, especially one that had a price tag of about $37,000,000,000,000. And, it’s price is inflating. In fact, if you don’t hand over a check within 21 seconds, it’s cost will be $1,000,000 more. And if you think that I’m pulling these figures out of the air, google “U.S. Debt Clock.” You can watch your money disappear down the hole in the District of Columbia’s outhouse.