According to some estimates, the present value of the cost of Social Security and Medicare’s unfunded promises now stands at more than $175 trillion.  Add $36 trillion more in federal debt ($26 trillion held by the public) and the total is well over $200 trillion.  Even with historical economic growth and productivity increases, there is no way that these obligations can ever be met out of real resources so long as they continue to increase.  What’s worse is that the nation cannot count on growth and productivity maintaining historical trends, as growing debt service and entitlement payments increasingly crowd out private capital investment.  This ever larger burden on the private economy threatens the entire free market system.

So that citizens can get a handle on just how large a trillion is, the Wall Street Journal published three Letters to the Editor this week providing illustrations of a trillion dollars. Hugh F. Wynn’s letter can be viewed here (The Painful Parade of Zeros, Letters, April 7), and William F. Meurs’ letter can be viewed here (A Quiz Question on the Debt, Letters, April 8).  The third letter is from me, which the Journal published today (print edition).  The published version, edited by the Journal for space, can be viewed here (How Does the Debt Stack Up?, Letters, April 11).

Below is my original, unedited submission.

William F. Meurs’ hypothetical of a person spending a trillion dollars a day for 2740 years to illustrate how enormous a trillion dollars is (A Quiz Question on the Debt, Letters, April 8) improves on Hugh F. Wynn’s string of zeros (The Painful Parade of Zeros, Letters, April 7), but still falls short of most people’s real world experience.  How many of us have ever spent a million dollars in a day?  Nearly everyone, however, has walked a mile.  A better question therefore is how high would a stack of a trillion dollar bills (new and crisp, not rumpled) reach?  The answer is 67860 miles, more than a quarter of the way to the moon.  Of course, were it hundred dollar bills, the stack would be merely 679 miles, just one long day’s drive.