The United States Will Soon Owe More Than $12 Trillion Dollars

The United States is currently less than $9 billion dollars away from having a total national debt of over $12 trillion dollars.

As of this second, the United States currently owes $11,991,219,535,897.86.

This works out to $39,468 for every man, woman and child in the United States.

Given the way that the national debt has been rising over the past few years, it should just be a matter of days before we pass the $12 trillion dollar mark for the very first time.

The national debt load has more than doubled from 1999. Since 2004, we have added nearly $5 trillion dollars to our debt load.

I think that we are at the point where most people are just numb to the steadily increasing debt load of the country.

According to recently released projections from President Obama and the CBO (Congressional Budget Office), the United States should have around $20 trillion dollars in total debt by 2020. You don't have to be an economist to understand that servicing a debt load this large will be incredibly expensive for the United States.

Of our nearly $12 trillion dollars in debt, approximately $7.6 trillion is "public debt", while the rest is "intragovernmental holdings".

"Public debt" is money that is owed to entities such as mutual funds, pension funds, foreign governments, etc.

Of the foreign governments that own US debt, China and Japan have the most.

"Intragovernmental holdings" represents money that the United States has borrowed from itself.

For instance, the United States will borrow from the Social Security program to help fund its deficit spending. This is an "IOU" that must be paid back at some point. The US government currently owes over $2 trillion dollars to the Social Security fund.

With the October deficit clocking in at just over $176 billion dollars (a record) and people growing more and more anxious about the growing national debt, it shouldn't come as a shock that President Obama will be pushing for domestic spending cuts or freezes in the months ahead in an attempt to rein in our shockingly large deficits.

Source: United States Debt Clock

Filed under: The Economic Meltdown