Understanding the national debt

To the Editor:

I look forward to receiving your publication every Wednesday and would like to clarify something. Maybe a better word would be educate. I don’t think the masses of people realize what a trillion is, let alone 16 trillion.

It’s just a number to them and they seem to be unconcerned about the enormity of that number.

Here is how it is explained. We all know what a million is. From 1 million we know a billion is 1,000 million. From a billion we know that a trillion is 1,000 billion.

So our country’s debt of $16 trillion is actually $16,000 billion!

If explained that way, perhaps people will understand just how enormous that amount is.

Does anyone think we can pay off our country’s debt? And will it keep rising under our re-elected president?

M. Meyer

Ballwin