Just How Much Is Your Share Of The National Debt?

A break down of just how much each real productive private sector worker in America owes in terms of the national debt.

Since the public sector is funded through the tax rolls, it makes no sense to include them in economic calculations that determine how much each worker owes in terms of the national debt.

For example, if the economy consisted entirely of US soldiers, taxing them to fund their own paychecks would be entirely pointless because they don’t actually produce anything of value that can be traded, sold, or consumed.  Further, their salaries, and hence the taxes they pay on those salaries, are arbitrary and not set by market forces.  It is impossible to know how much a police officer is worth since there is no market mechanism to determine their actual value.  Police pay could be cut in half and it is entirely possible that all police job openings would still be filled.  Additionally, there may be an oversupply or under supply of police positions since there is no market mechanism to determine just how many police are needed in a given area.

Granted there will be some public sector jobs that perform necessary private sector functions, and hence provide real value with real taxable earnings, but because their pay and the number of jobs is not set by market forces, it is impossible to determine their real taxable contributions to society.

Thus, any calculation of how much money needs to be coercively confiscated from the public in order to clear the debt should exclude those who are funded entirely from the tax rolls.

Economic Populist reports:

Of the 105,229,000 in the working age population, 28,255,000 were not working on Dec. 31, 2009.

The national debt is currently:


Divided among the working aged population, as of 2009 figures, each worker owes roughly:




Divided among the working population not paid from the tax rolls (16.6 million full-time equivalent public employees for state and local government in 2009, and 3.63 million federal and active duty military employees, which comes to 20.3 million total) of 56,674,000 workers, each private sector worker owes roughly:


Of the 56,674,000 private sector workers who are not in the defense industry, which is funded entirely by tax dollars (about 3 million workers), each of the 53,674,000 real productive private sector workers owe roughly:


A 2002 study says Public spending accounts for between 45% and 56.1% of U.S. health care.  Assuming those numbers haven’t changed much, we’ll say 50% of healthcare spending is tax based, and so we shall deduct half the of the medical workforce from the real productive worker total.

Of the 53,674,000 productive workers who are not tax funded medical workers (14.3 million divided by 2 = 7.15 million), that leaves us with 46,524,000 productive privately funded workers.

Each of those 46,524,000 productive privately funded workers owes roughly:


So in order for the national debt to be paid off, each productive private sector worker in our economy would have to cough up over a third of a million dollars each.

One more reason why this country is going to hell.