John Steele Gordon has a good piece in The American about debt. Some numbers first:

At the end of fiscal 2008, which came on September 30 of last year, the American national debt stood at $9.6 trillion. That sum is, perhaps, quite beyond the imagining of most people. It is, after all, 250 million times the average per capita income. Even the total fortunes of the entire Forbes 400 list add up to less than 15 percent of it. To use a journalistic measure that dates back to the late 18th century—when the British national debt had become a major political issue in that country—if you laid 9.6 trillion silver dollars end to end, they would reach to the sun and back, with enough left over to wrap around the Earth more than 1,700 times.

That’s 60.8 percent of our GDP. The good news is that many countries are in much worse situations (Japan’s debt is 173 percent of GDP), and it’s been worse in our past (at the end of WW2, debt was 130 percent of GDP). The bad news is that it’s getting worse every day thanks to the administration’s love for spending other people’s cash.

For an interesting account of how we got in this situation, read here (and then start making plans to march on the Capitol on Saturday September 12 to protest big government).