Over on the Space board of Habiablezone, Larry J. provided some very interesting numbers concerning the national debt:

http://www.habitablezone.com/space/messages/25602.html

He also provided the government source for this information:

http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/opd/opdpenny.htm

The huge and growing national debt is one of my pet hates. It's an invisible form of taxation where government expense is transferred to future generations. It's the worst form of taxation without representation.

Being an engineer, I felt myself compelled to play around with the numbers and came up with the following curve fit:

Debt_in_$ = 2.137 * 10^9 * 10^(0.03397 * (T - 1900))

Replace "T" with the date and you'll get the approximate national debt. If you take the base 10 log of the national debt and plot it as a function of time from 1900 to the present then you'll find the above curve fit is a good approximation. Doing such a plot is also interesting because it clearly shows the impact of World War I, the Great Depression and World War II.

Here's another fun thing one can do with this curve fit. Estimate America's total national worth by assuming there are 2.811 * 10^8 people in the U.S. and each one is worth $100,000. The estimate works out to be $28 trillion. Next plug $28 trillion into the above equation and calculate when the United States will be bankrupted by the national debt (bankrupt is defined as financial obligations exceeding total assets). The answer is 2021 ! Isn't that amazing! The U.S. will go broke in 19 years. Of course it won't. There's two obvious solutions to this problem:

1) A balanced budget constitutional amendment. (No way!)
2) Evaporate the debt by inflating the dollar away to nothing.

Option 2) has the additional fringe benefits of "curing" the Social Security and Medicare problem. The government simply pays for everone's Social Security and Medicare expenses with worthless dollars. Sure glad Hillary didn't succeed in socializing our medical system. Now I need to figure out how to convince my employer to pay my salary in gold.....

Gary