I found some helpful illustrations to give us a better picture of what our national debt looks like. Not one of the two men running for office this year are serious about tackling this problem, because to do so would be real, serious cuts, which neither is prepared to do. But here is a good example so that you can visualize America's debt.

First let's start with $100. Everyone loves Ben Franklin! He makes friends for you wherever you take him.

This is a pack of $100 bills that is less than 1/2" thick and contains a total of $10,000. It will easily fit in your pocket.

OK this next little pile is 100 packets of $10,000 or $1 million. It would easily fit in your backpack and you could carry it around.

Let's bump that a hundred times and now this is what $100 million looks like. It will sit neatly on a pallet.

Here's $1 Billion. Yeah now we're going to need some space to store that.

Our next jump is to $1 Trillion. Notice the pallets are doublestacked.

This is only $1 trillion! Now our current debt is being spoken of as just over $16 trillion, but our total obligations are more around $222 trillion currently. Hopefully this gives you a picture of the current problem we face.

So when politicians talk about a trimming of a billion or even hundreds of billions, they aren't even talking about serious money when it comes to our national debt.
