Visualizing The National Debt
March 2010


Visualizing The National Debt
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Reader Comments (6)

Posted by: John Woods at 03/17/2010 10:39:45 PM

Wow that is like amazng cool...

Posted by: Mitch at 03/18/2010 06:54:43 AM

...The chart above only covers our debt for a portion of the full budget. For example it ignores trillions in unfunded gov't programs we are forced to pay off. If we add *ONLY* the current unfunded liabilities it adds approx $200,000.00 PER PERSON! And just imagine how much this will go up with socialist health care.

Posted by: Steve at 03/18/2010 04:33:20 PM

...the debt was not $13.45 trillion in July 2009. The debt is currently $12.6 trillion and was probably about $1 trillion less back in July. All in all, this is really disturbing coming from a supposedly trusted organization like Kiplinger.

Posted by: Don Me at 03/19/2010 09:08:38 AM

This is helpful for perspective. But, we really need to remember all the other oligations of the federal government (social security, medicare, etc.) These total somewhere in the range of $90-110 trillion. So for that same family of 5, the numbers are actually more like $1.6 million. There's no way out of this. We will default on these obligations, one way or the other - actual default or very high inflation rates. It's gonna get very ugly.

Posted by: Doug Harbrecht at 03/22/2010 03:02:21 PM

Hi, I'm editor of Kiplinger.com. Thanks to everyone who pointed out--correctly--that the circle ratios in our previous graphic were done by diameter, not by area, thus skewing the results to make the circles look smaller than than they should appear. We have corrected that math error in the above graphic. To STEVE, please note that the $13.45 billion debt number is the U.S. external debt, NOT the U.S. national debt. External debt is a measure of how much debt the U.S. owes other countries. The national debt measures annual federal deficits. Hope this helps. And thanks again for all your feedback and discussion.

Posted by: Dn$ at 07/22/2010 07:25:27 PM

National debt as of 7/21/2010 is $13,237,494,446,894.52