$8,021,480,952,298.81

I felt better about my student loan balance when I stumbled upon this web site. It is the Department of the Treasury's Bureau of the Public Debt, on which they list, to the penny, how much money the United States Government owes.

It owes $8,021,480,952,298.81.

You can learn other interesting things from the Bureau of the Public Debt. The historical archives list the outstanding debt every year of the nation's history. We learn that the first time the debt broke $1 billion was in 1863. Waging total war is expensive, it seems.

It rose only a few billion in the next sixty years, then ballooned to $14.6 billion in 1918 and almost doubled to $27 billion the next year. The rate of increase is surprisingly small through the New Deal, reaching only $40 billion by 1939--and then soared to $258 billion from World War II. Eisenhower kept it fairly steady, but Kennedy's tax cuts, Johnson's Great Society, and the Vietnam War saw it nearly double to just under $500 billion by 1974--and then double again to breach $1 trillion by Reagan's first year of office.

The United States has never been out of debt. It came close in 1835, with only $33,733 in arrears. One could throw out shocking numbers--that about 87 percent of the money we now owe was borrowed in the last 25 years--but of course inflation has something to do with that (1918 dollars bought a lot more than 2005 dollars do, so we didn't need to borrow as much back then) so the statistic is spurious.

Nonetheless, just take a moment to say $8,021,480,952,298.81 a few times. $8,021,480,952,298.81. Eight trillion, twenty-one billion, four hundred eighty million, nine hundred fifty two thousand, two hundred nintey eight dollars and eighty-one cents. Congressmen should be forced to write it out longhand a few times everytime they want to earmark another pork barrel project.