So I listen to quite a bit of talk radio and one topic that comes up fairly often these days is the national debt, how big it is, how it's going to ruin our kids and so on. I wanted to put those numbers in some other terms to see how it turns out.
Let's start with the raw numbers. The
national debt (as of this writing, 6/22/2011) is $14.3 trillion and the
population of the US is about 308.7 million. That works out to over $46,000 for every man, woman and child.
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| That'll be $184,000 if you please. |
Another thing that comes up on talk radio is the weakening of the dollar and how we should all be investing in precious metals since they never loose value (assuming we ignore that whole 1980 - 2000 timeframe). Usually what they're recommending is gold and silver and we're dealing with some big numbers here so we'll go with gold which currently has a bid price of $1550 per troy ounce.
A little spreadsheet work later will show that our debt, converted to gold would be 287,681 TONNES of gold, that's a cube of solid gold the height of an 8 story building.
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| Only in pure gold. |
How much is that per person? A block about 3.6 cm or just under 1.5 inches.
There's a slight problem though, we don't have that much. And by "we" I mean everyone. According to the
World Gold Council, we've mined about 165,600 tonnes in all of human history. We owe 1.7 times more gold than has ever been found. Now rhodium is the most expensive precious metal at $1950/oz so in that we're down to owing 228,802 tonnes but considering the annual production of it is only about 25 tonnes, it'll take a while to save that much up.
Diamonds! If you really want some buck from the bang, it's hard to get much better than internally flawless, colorless diamonds. The Diamond Registry lists diamond prices from .5 to 10 carats and they average around $18,500/ct. Now remember that's for the best of the best, most diamonds out there will have some color to them or have some level of internal flaws and so will sell for quite a bit less. For instance a VS1 will probably be about half that price. We'll go with the best out there.
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| Maybe a few shovel loads will do the trick. |
$14 trillion at $18,500/ct = 776.6 million carats or 154,528 kilos of perfect diamonds. Diamonds are also fairly heavy for their size but nothing close to gold (it's about 1/7th of what gold weighs). Our cube of perfect diamond would be 3.5 meters per side or about 11 and a half feet. If we break that up again among the population, we're down to a diamond that's only a half centimeter or about 2.2 carats.
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| This is what you owe. |
So you see, if you put the problem in perspective, it doesn't seem so bad any more.
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| Or does it? |
