I don’t know about you but I find it awfully hard to comprehend the numbers flying around in describing the massive debt load of the U.S. government.  Here’s something that might help.

Today it was announced that 68 billion dollars of TARP money would be paid back to the Treasury.  If every one of those dollars was a second, how many years would this sum represent?  The answer is 2,156 years OR 147 years before Christ.

Just for curiosity, I thought I would run the numbers for 1 trillion of debt.  The answer to this question is truly unfathomable at 31,710 years.  I leave you to wrestle with the implications.