Debt-Miles

Bear with me - this page is under heavy construction. This is very facty at the moment, and I am working on the truthification of it. Atenea del Sol 01:19, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Debt-Miles are a way of looking at how far your debt can get you, measured in $1 bills. This article deals with the Debt-Miles accumulated by the United States of America.

For Starters...
A US one-dollar bill is 2.61" wide and 6.14" long (see FRN, wikipedia). For the sake of convenience, we will lay the dollar bills end to end.

To put everything in perspective, one mile contains approximately $10,300.00 US worth of debt. Therefore, 100 miles is about $1.03 million US dollars, and 3,000 miles (the approximate distance from New Jersey to Los Angeles) represents about $31 million US dollars of debt.

However, even if one only counts TARP, at $700 billion, and the 2009 stimulus package at $825 billion (a total of $1,525 billion US dollars) the distances involved are astronomical. Namely, the distance in Debt-Miles of $1,525 billion US is 14,777,250 miles.

Distances Involved
The amount of debt accumulated by the United States far surpasses just the bailout fund amounts (thus far), and is so large that it forms the equivalent of 50.5 trips to the Moon. (or 25 round trips, more than has yet been made by human astronauts of all nations combined.)

The proposed US bank bailout is estimated at $4 trillion. Therefore, the bank bailout alone in Debt-Miles is 386.7 million miles. This is the equivalent of successive round trips to: the Moon, Mercury, Venus, and a one-way trip to Mars with lots of change left over (although not quite enough to get you back to Earth.) {footnote - astronomical distances from site.com, calculations by the author)

The amount of debt accumulated by the United States of America, including the sub-prime mortgage crisis, hedge fund collapses, domestic bank collapses, and the one trillion-dollar a year tax cut under the Bush administration, is very conservatively estimated at $70 trillion US. This is the equivalent, in Debt-Miles, of 6,783,000,000 miles. Or, to put it into perspective, that's a round-trip to Pluto, the most distant planetoid in our solar system. {ibid}

The fact that this debt was leveraged and re-lent at the rate of 10:1 compounded annually for eight years gives us closer to 100 trillion Debt-miles, enough for about two round trips to Alpha Centauri, the star nearest our solar system. For perpective, that's 4.36 light years distant - a light-year being how far light travels in one standard calendar year, assuming that it's moving at the speed of light. To use common units, that's about 671,000,000 miles per hour!

Table of Distances
The following is a table of the distances, in miles, from Earth to the Sun, Moon, and planets of the Solar System, as well as to Alpha Centauri and the Galactic Center.