Fun with Numbers
The average income in the U.S. is $25,000 per year. Assuming a 40-hour work week, that works out to be $12.02 per hour.
The average lifespan in the U.S. is 78 years. Assuming you start work at 18 and retire at 65, that’s 47 working years. That’s 97,760 working hours using a 40-hour work week.
In 2009, the federal government in the U.S. is estimated to have spent somewhere around $3 trillion (varies, depending on source, but $3 trillion is about the “average” figure I’ve come across). That would be $3,000,000,000,000.
It would take 24,958,403,000 hours to pay that off.
It would take 255,303 people working their entire lives to pay that off.
And that’s just this year’s spending.
To pay it off in one year’s time, it would take 11,999,232 average people giving 100% of their income.
In other words, if you figure money spent in terms of hours worked, federal spending in 2009 is the equivalent of nearly 12 million people working all year and not keeping any of their money.
I almost blacked out looking at all those numbers
Most voters do not give a hoot, as long as they GET and do not pay. I am not in that line …
[...] time believing, some time acting, and even more time achieving. More recently, he decided to have some fun with numbers, working out that it would take 255,303 people working their entire lives in order to pay off just [...]