How Big Is the US National Debt?

Just read a couple articles poking fun at the size of the debt.

The current US national debt stands at $8.595 trillion.

Here's one article ( America Votes for Change -- Dollar Under Pressure )

Here is a snippet from that article.

• Today we learned China’s October trade surplus soared to yet another all-time high of $23.8 billion…just for the month of October! China’s trade surplus is running about 30% higher than last year and has already reached $133.6 billion year-to-date. China’s exports jumped 29.6% higher, while their imports only rose by 14.7%. China is set to eclipse the one-trillion dollar mark in holdings of U.S. debt paper. It seems to me most folks think of a trillion dollars and say, “Oh well, it is what it is…” In my lifetime, we have transitioned from being the biggest creditor nation in the world to the biggest debtor nation in all of mankind’s history.
  
  Can you get a trillion dollars (that we owe to China) in your mind’s-eye? For a quick visual I will convert dollars to seconds: There are 86,400 seconds in a day.
  
  One million seconds = 11.6 days.
  
  One billion seconds = 31.8 years.
  
  One trillion seconds = 31,800 years!
  
  We glibly throw these numbers around, but what does it mean for our children’s futures? We are permanently in debt!! Looks like we will have to devalue the dollar with continuing monetary inflation to service our debt.

LOL!!

The US National Debt is $8.595 trillion.

Just imagine if the US manages to pay off its debt at the rate of US1.00 per second. It would take 273,321 years to pay all its debts!!!

Houston, don't you have a tiny weenie problem here?

And here is another article from Mike Hewitt (DollarDaze.org)

Here is what he illlustrates the size of the debt - the size of 8.595 trillion!!!

• In order to illustrate just how large that number is consider the following…

The size of a dollar bill is 6.6294 cm wide, by 15.5956 cm long, and 0.010922 cm in thickness. It would take approximately 96,721,648 dollar bills to make up one square kilometre.

If we were to cover an area with enough dollar bills to pay off the current US debt it would have an area of 88,863 square kilometres which would cover slightly more than the entire state of South Carolina!

When stacked, the number of dollar bills required to represent the US debt would be 938,746 km high. This is nearly three times the distance to the moon!

Laid end to end the dollar bills would measure 1,340,488,443 km - that nearly reaches Saturn from the Sun!

WOW! WOW! WOW! WOW! WOW! WOW! WOW!