this does make me feel warm and fuzzy inside

so i was checking out a list of countries by external debt and surprise! the united states is numero uno. ouch. so then i checked over to our trusty treasury department to see exactly how much outstanding debt we've got.

as of may 18th: $8,804,563,826,561.37 (total public debt outstanding)

i dont really know what that means other than it has 4 commas in it. lets see:

the city of lincoln, ne has 95,199 household units in it (2000 census). thats houses, apartments, condos etc. if you've got a front door, you've got a housing unit. lets assume that every housing unit in lincoln is a million dollar home. i think we all know what a million dollar home looks like. so if every front door in the entire city of lincoln is attached to a million dollar home, it would take 92 cities of lincoln to add up to our total public debt outstanding. and you would still have 46 billion dollars left over to buy over 2 million, $20,000 cars.

hot dang.

but maybe that hard to think of lincoln being all $1 million homes. so heres another comparison:
the actual valuation of the city of beatrice, ne is $497,256,258. that means our national debt could buy 16,000 cities of beatrice

or how about this. given that a one dollar bill is about 6 and 1/8 inches long. if you lined up over 8 trillion dollar bills from end to end the money trail would go from san francisco to new york and back 165,526 times

talk about a road trip