Political Quotes

“the number 22 trillion should matter to us. That is our current debt in the United States. Not to be confused, we have debts, and we have deficits. You will hear those names get thrown around together. Deficit is the amount of overspending in a single year--1 year of overspending--and debt is the collection of all of those deficits. As a nation, our current debt is $22 trillion. To give some perspective on 22 trillion, if you were to take the total distance of 22 trillion miles, you would have to fly from Earth to Pluto and back 3,081 times to get to 22 trillion miles. This is heavy debt. We are used to hearing about debts and deficits in relationship to things like home mortgages. Many of us think about taking 30 years to pay off our mortgage. Well, for us to pay off our national mortgage, this $22 trillion--if we were to balance our budget, which is way out of balance right now, and then have a $100 billion surplus--so let's say that by next year, we have a balanced budget and a $100 billion surplus. That would be a very large surplus for us. How many years of $100 billion surpluses in total revenue would it take to pay off $22 trillion? The quick math on that is 220 years. That is approximately as long as we have been a republic. If we had a $100 billion surplus every single year for the next 220 years, we could pay off our mortgage.…”