Our Debt. . . Save the Children

By Ed Henry

If you had a nice neat stack of $100 bills 40 inches high, you would have a million dollars.

A billion dollars is a thousand million. If you could keep it from falling over, a billion dollars in $100 bills all in one stack or on one helluva spindle would be more than 300 stories high. More than three Sears Towers stacked one on top of the other. It would be 3,333 feet high, a hazard to air traffic requiring beacons flashing day and night.

The amount that the Bush administration borrowed from investors last month, October 2002, was ironically 33.3 times as much as the above and if stacked all together in $100 bills would reach 21 miles into space. That's not feet or inches, but 21 statute miles of 5,280 feet to the mile.

And that's not all. The Bush administration ran up the entitlement side of the national debt another $20.9 billion which means that the total national debt went up $54.3 billion last month, October 2002. Now, our monthly stack of $100 bills would reach 34.2 miles into space. And that's only what your government added to the tab in one month.

If you took the entire national debt and it was possible to stack it neatly in $100 bills, that stack would extend 3,966 miles into space. "One of these days Alice, to the moon."

If our hypothetical spindle was based in New York City and it fell to the east, we could have a narrow bridge across the Atlantic to Berlin. If it fell to the west, the top would land more than 900 miles offshore from San Francisco in the Pacific.

From another direction.

If you set aside $7 million a day from the birth of Christ, from the beginning of the Gregorian calendar 2,002 years ago, you would be able to pay off the national debt by November of the year 2458. That's only 456 years from now. Of course, right now the national debt would have to stop going up.

There are nitwits who tell us that the United States can easily afford a debt of this size because our Gross Domestic Product is more than $10 trillion a year. At $6.3 trillion, the national debt is only about 60 percent of the GDP.

The implication here is that all we have to do is stop spending money for six or seven months of the year, send everything we make to the government, and everything will be hunky dory. It really means we would all be dead in a matter of weeks.

Don't buy medicine. Don't buy gasoline or groceries. Don't go to Starbucks or McDonald's. Of course, there wouldn't be anybody there anyway because they would all be doing the same thing. How long do you think you could last that way, even if we didn't start killing each other over what's left on the shelves?

We all know what the sensible solution is. Set up a payment plan within our means.

Unfortunately, the most we've ever paid against the national debt was $230 billion in fiscal 2000 and that wasn't enough to keep the debt from going up another $18 billion that year due to interest and the theft of entitlement surpluses.

If you go to any mortgage lender or any of the plug-in mortgage models on the Internet, you will find that paying off the national debt in anything less than 50 years requires annual payments of at least $350 billion a year. And that's with interest as low as 5 percent.

However.

There is one thing we could do that would be of benefit to all of us. We could get rid of the bogus bonds that our crooked government has awarded us while they played a con game called "borrowing" entitlement money—actually stealing our surplus Social Security, Medicare, gas taxes, and other excessive overpayments.

We don't need these phony securities. The entire "Intragovernmental Holdings" side of the national debt, currently standing at $2.7 trillion, is fraudulent. Worse than anything Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossings, Arthur Andersen, or any of the corporations under investigation by the Justice Department and SEC have done.

Wipe that fraudulent $2.7 trillion from the crooked books and we've only got $3.6 trillion in honest debt to investors to pay off.

We would all be better off if the crooks had the integrity to simply take the money and run in the first place instead of tricking us with their double taxation scam.

"Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact."

Ed Henry is the founder of TUFF, the Taxpayers Union, and a regular columnist for Ether Zone.

Ed Henry can be reached at ctzcrank@mindspring.com

We also invite you to visit his website at www.uncle-scam.com

Published in the November 14, 2002 issue of  Ether Zone. Copyright © 1997 - 2002 Ether Zone.

TLP Opinion

This article gives an excellent perspective as to the size of the alleged "National Debt."

The author also hints at something which he doesn't come right out and say-- but we will:

Most of the alleged "National Debt" is a fraud.

The alleged debt arises out of fraudulent banking practices, perpetrated by an unconstitutional, unlawful private banking system known as the Federal Reserve. This system is not, as most people believe, a government-owned and/or controlled bank but is, in fact, completely private (see Federal Reserve Ownership).

If our memory serves correctly, the Federal Reserve Act provides for the U.S. Treasury to buy out the Federal Reserve System at any time, for a mere $300 Million. Doing so immediately would wipe out most of the interest due, and accumulating, on this alleged debt.

Of course this is not likely to happen any time soon, since any leader or group of leaders who tried it would be summarily executed by assassins for the World Bank.