{"id":15991,"date":"2014-11-04T07:09:26","date_gmt":"2014-11-04T06:09:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=15991"},"modified":"2014-11-04T07:09:26","modified_gmt":"2014-11-04T06:09:26","slug":"how-big-is-the-american-national-debt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=15991","title":{"rendered":"How big is the American national debt?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The short answer is approximately $18 trillion.<\/p>\n<p>But most people have no idea what a trillion is. In most English-speaking countries (usage varies around thew world!), a trillion is 1,000 billion and a billion is 1,000 million, so a trillion is 1,000,000,000,000. \u00a0Therefore $18 trillion is a LARGE number.<\/p>\n<p>But it still means little unless one has some context. You&#8217;ll find some useful ways of looking at the figure <a href=\"http:\/\/www.justfacts.com\/nationaldebt.asp#quantifying\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>As Americans go to the polls today in the mid term Congressional elections, I wonder how many candidates have said anything meaningful about the US national debt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The short answer is approximately $18 trillion. But most people have no idea what a trillion is. In most English-speaking countries (usage varies around thew world!), a trillion is 1,000 billion and a billion is 1,000 million, so a trillion is 1,000,000,000,000. \u00a0Therefore $18 trillion is a LARGE number. But it still means little unless [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-us-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15991"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15991\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15995,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15991\/revisions\/15995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}