Buffet on the Deficit

“There is no distinctly American criminal class – except Congress.” — Mark Twain

The US government runs up massive deficits. The US national debt is currently around $35 trillion (wiki.)

That number is too large for anyone to comprehend. Numbers in the hundreds — even in the thousands — make intuitive sense to us. But millions, billions and trillions are incomprehensibly large.

Here’s one way to see how our intuition is incapable of visualizing large numbers. A thousand seconds is a little less than 17 minutes. A million seconds is 12 days. That is easily understood. But then it gets harder to get a feel for the higher order numbers. Continue reading “Buffet on the Deficit”