Facts about the US National Debt 

The US National Debt matters because higher debt results in: higher taxes, reduced 'benefits' and programs, higher interest rates, and a weak dollar. All of which will make the United States a much weaker and less free nation. It is stealing from the future by spending their money today and reducing growth now which hurts everyone in coming years.

1. On January 1, 1791, the US National Debt was $75 million. It increases by that amount every hour today (2010).
2. $1 trillion = $1,000 billion or $1,000,000,000,000 (that's 12 zeros).
3. In 2010 the United States issued nearly as much debt than the rest of the world governments combined.
4. The budget deficit for 2011 alone will end up being well over 10 percent of GDP. A very dangerous level.
5. For 2010, debt as a percentage of GDP was 94.3% in the United States. For Greece, who is having massive problems, the figure was 115.1% (see here). Increasing at 10% per year (see above) means we will hit the Greece level in 2012 or 2013. [2011:Some estimates put it at 150% of GDP now, which the US could reach at 10% growth per year just a few years from now.]
6. The World does not have enough money to lend the United States so for the nine months ending June 2011, the Federal Reserve purchased nearly all the debt issued by the United States Government. It did this by printing money out of thin air, "quantitative easing" in Washington double-speak.
7. The U.S. government currently has to borrow approximately 41 cents of every single dollar that it spends.
8. During President Obama's first two years in office, the U.S. government added more to the U.S. national debt than the first 100 U.S. Congresses combined.
9. Just before the start of President Bush's term, at end of calendar year 2000, the debt stood at $5.629 trillion. Eight years later, the federal debt stood at $9.986 trillion.
10. For President Obama, the debt started at $9.986 trillion in January 2009 and increased to $13.7 trillion, a 38 percent increase over two years, by January 2011. By May 2011 it stood at $14.3 Trillion - $600 Billion in 4 months.
    
11. Spending one dollar per second, it would take twelve days to spend $1 million. It would take more than 31000 years (31709.792 years) to spend one trillion. The deficit presently stands around $1.5 Trillion per year. If you were alive when Christ was born and you spent $1 million every single day since that point, you still would not have spent $1 trillion dollars by now - you would have spent about $734 Billion.