The actual addition to the federal budget isn’t that dramatic.
If you paid $1 per second, it would take you:
12 days to spend $1 million
32 years to spend $1 billion
32,000 years to spend $1 trillion
Imagine spending $1 every second for 32,000 years. It's ridiculous! Yet we throw that number around like it "isn't that dramatic". We will never be able to pay off that borrowed money! And it will work until it doesn't. And then we will wish we were never so foolish.
Comparing things on the scale of the national budget of the country with the world's largest economy to things on individual scale is kind of like comparing a person's height to the radius of the moon. It's going to confuse more than it elucidates.
Edit: To be clear, my comparison is bad too. Comparison to individuals is just not the type of tool that makes sense for looking at national level things, because by cherry picking the comparison you can convince it to say anything you want.
No, this is not right at all. The total income of the United States government is $4 trillion per year. So a $1 trillion loan is 25% of gross annual income. The $3 trillion being added to the debt is 75% of gross annual income.
GDP is not the income of the United States government. But this new debt will be debt of the United States government.
The reality is that we are $29 trillion in debt now and adding to it rapidly. That is 7.25 years of gross income in debt. What would you say to someone that made $100,000 per year and was in debt $725,000?
If you just want to throw large numbers around, why not just convert everything into cents? Imagine spending 1 cent per second for 3.2 million years! That’s a long time.
