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How much is five trillion dollars? It’s a whole lot. This website has a good illustration of how stupifyingly much a fifth of it is. Worth keeping in mind while pondering over this:

Here are the most striking facts, and if you want more details, you can look at CBO’s tables.

In 2008, the net federal debt as a percent of GDP was 40.8 percent. By 2019, it would have risen, under current law as defined above, to 56.1 percent of GDP. Under the Obama budget, it would double to 82.4 percent of GDP, a whopping 47 percent increase from the baseline.

I should add that virtually everyone expected current law not to be the relevant baseline because whoever won the election, the Bush tax cuts for people who are not high income would have been extended. This revision of the law accounts for roughly $2 trillion of the approximately $5 trillion addition to the national debt, with increased spending accounting for the other $3 trillion.

Read the whole thing. It will be quite a challenge to move towards smaller government in the U.S. for quite some time.

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