The US national debt has topped a record $40 trillion.
It’s a grim milestone in the history of the nation’s fiscal health. America’s debt burden is rising faster than estimates just a few years ago, exacerbated by persistent deficits and soaring interest payments.
And the national debt keeps rising, adding nearly $7 billion each day, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a fiscal watchdog group.
However, it can be difficult to wrap your head around the gigantic number. Just how big is $40 trillion?
All told, 40 trillion is 1 billion, 40,000 times over.
Or 1 million, 40 million times over.
At $40 trillion, if the United States were to pay down $1 billion of debt each day, it would take nearly 110 years to pay it all off. At $1 million per day, it would take nearly 110,000 years.
Here’s a list of comparisons to put into perspective just how large the national debt has become.
The US population is roughly 343 million people, according to Census Bureau data.
That means the total national debt of $40 trillion comes out to about $117,000 per American.
The current debt is roughly double its value just 10 years ago.
In August 2016, the total national debt was just below $20 trillion. In the past decade, the debt has doubled to $40 trillion.
“Unsustainable borrowing on this scale has huge repercussions throughout the economy, straining efforts to address affordability and risking a dangerous debt spiral if lawmakers don’t act,” Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told CNN.
Entrepreneur Elon Musk made headlines in June when his net worth surpassed $1 trillion after the SpaceX initial public offering. But even adding up the wealth of the world’s richest people gets only a fraction of the way to the value of the national debt.
The 10 richest people in the world have a combined net worth of $2.7 trillion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The national debt is worth almost 15 times that.
And if you keep adding the rest of the world’s richest people, you don’t get much closer. The total net worth of all 500 richest people on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index comes out to almost $13 trillion.
Across all of history, roughly 220,700 tonnes of gold have been mined, according to the World Gold Council.
At gold’s current spot price of roughly $4,600 a troy ounce, the total value of all gold ever mined comes out to roughly $33 trillion — still $7 trillion less than the national debt.
Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, has a market cap of more than $5.2 trillion. It would take more than seven Nvidia’s to match the size of the federal debt.
The top 11 most valuable companies in the S&P 500 have a combined market value of roughly $28 trillion – still $12 trillion less than the value of the national debt.
The International Space Station is estimated to cost roughly $117 billion, according to the European Space Agency.
At that whopping price tag, it would still take about 340 International Space Stations to reach the value of the national debt.
The federal debt is larger than the entire value of the goods and services produced in the US economy.
The US economy, as measured by gross domestic product, was valued at over $32 trillion in the second quarter of this year, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Comparing the debt to GDP can help make comparisons between different nations. The United States’ debt-to-GDP ratio is at roughly 123%, near a record high. It first surpassed 100% in 2012.
That puts the US debt burden in the top 10 around the world, according to data from the International Monetary Fund. The only countries with higher debt-to-GDP ratios than the United States are Japan, Singapore, Sudan, Bahrain, Italy, Greece, Senegal and the Maldives.
Take the five largest economies after the United States. The US national debt is larger than all of them combined.
China, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and India have GDPs roughly valued at a combined $37 trillion, according to World Bank data.
That’s about $3 trillion less than the total US debt burden.
Total US household debt, including mortgages, auto loans, credit card debt and student loans, was almost $19 trillion in the second quarter, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That’s about half the US government’s total debt burden.
Zooming in, total US credit card debt hit $1.26 trillion in the second quarter, according to the New York Fed. The US national debt is almost 32 times the value of all outstanding US credit card debt.
The total value of retirement assets in the United States was $47.6 trillion in the first quarter of this year, according to the Investment Company Institute.
The national debt, at $40 trillion, is equivalent to almost 85% of all retirement assets in the United States.
