How Much Do You Know About US Debt? 

Question: Do you know what the current level of US government debt is?

Answer: $35 trillion in national debt – which is $105,000 for every individual and $270,000 for every US household.

Question: Do you know how much of that debt was acquired during the last 12 months?

Answer: $2.3 trillion. That’s about $6.4 billion every single day, roughly $266.7 million an hour, and around $4.44 million a minute.

Question: Do you know how much of your income taxes were spent on interest on the national debt?

Answer: Last year, US Treasury net interest expense was $81 billion. That’s 43% of the $185 billion the government collected in income tax receipts.

I know. This is hard to believe if you trust the government. But if you trust the government, you haven’t thought seriously about it. The way our government works is that all the incentives of the political class favor endless borrowing and endlessly increasing debt. A debt bubble that will one day pop.

Here is Bill Bonner explaining why this is so.