Our Teeny-Tiny National Debt

Today I read this in an article at Townhall.com:

If you stacked $8 trillion worth of dollar bills, one on top of the other, how tall would the pile reach? . . . [Answer:] You could stack dollar bills all the way to the moon, and then all the way back, and still not have used eight trillion of them.

I’ve been saying over, and over, and over at this website that focusing on raw dollars of debt is a nearly meaningless exercise, if objective financial or economic analysis is the goal.  The ratio of debt-to-GDP is far more meaningful.  (However, if scoring political points is the goal, talking of raw dollars is a smart move—because fear is a powerful audience-motivator.  Why do you think lefties, righties, or anybody else trying to make some kind of political point bases the argument on raw dollars of debt?)

Okay, the gloves are coming off.  It’s time for me to start fighting fire with fire.  Here goes...

How big is our national debt, really?
Many writers, to illustrate the size of our national debt, calculate how large a stack of currency it would take to equal $8 trillion.  But, right off the bat, that metaphor is faulty.  Why?  Because there’s only $771 billion of currency in existence.  Compared to the national debt of $8 trillion, the dollar-bill metaphor misrepresents reality by a whopping 90.4%.   

Is there a better metaphor?  Of course there is.  In the real world, most of our money is represented not by currency, but by bits and bytes stored in computer memory devices.  And guess what: Computer memory devices are getting smaller, and smaller, and smaller.  The image below illustrates just how small it could get, one day very soon.  It’s based on a recently-patented idea for carbon nanotubes. 

The bottom line:  If one bit of memory represented one dollar of debt, then we could put our entire national debt onto a tiny wafer four millimeters on a side. 

In other words:

• Our entire national debt would fit easily onto the zero button of a cell phone.
 
• If we folded it twice, a dentist could hide it in somebody’s filling. 

• If we dropped it into our breakfast bowl, it would get lost forever among the cornflakes. 

• I could easily hide it in the spring mechanism of my ballpoint pen. 

• We could scotch-tape it to the corner of a postcard and mail it to North Korea. 

• We could spot-glue it to a golf ball and watch Tiger Woods hit it a mile. 

I’m sure you can think of a hundred other things we could do with that little 4-millimeter wafer of National Debt.  What I’d really like to do, though, is get our journalists to stop talking about the size of the raw dollars of debt, and start talking about something meaningful . . . such as the debt-to-GDP ratio.  If we could get our journalists to do it, our politicians would have no choice but to follow.