Lincoln Chafee: “Mr. President, when I speak with Rhode Islanders I often find it very difficult to put the budget problems in…”

“Mr. President, when I speak with Rhode Islanders I often find it very difficult to put the budget problems in perspective. Few, if any, of us understand what a billion dollars is, never mind what $1 trillion is But the current national debt of the United States is $5.3 trillion-- not billion dollars, not million dollars--trillion dollars. So we try to figure how can we put this in some form of perspective and what the national debt is. This is what we owe our children. And the national debt amounts to $20,000 for every American in our Nation, or a bill for a family of four of $80,000. Let me give you some idea of what $5 trillion is: $5 trillion is enough money to purchase every automobile ever sold in the United States and have enough money left over to purchase every airline ticket ever sold for travel in the United States. You buy all the automobiles that have been made in the history of the United States, and then you have money left over to buy every airline ticket that has ever been sold in the United States, and then you will have used up $5.3 trillion; $5 trillion is equal to the asset value of all the U.S. stocks held by Americans. If we went out to spend a dollar every second of every day to reach the goal of $5 trillion, it would take 158,000 years at a dollar per second.”