To the editor:

I keep hearing news lately that our national debt is getting pretty high, now $17 trillion and rising. We need an analogy to help grasp that number. Let’s use clocks and timepieces for reference. My old manual watch ticks five beats per second or oscillates at 2.5 Hz. Quartz watches have replaced the old mechanical watch, as most everyone has them, so we can all relate to these electronic timepieces. Quartz electronic watches oscillate at 32,768 cycles per second, quite a bit faster and more accurate.

If I let each cycle of the quartz oscillator in my watch represent $1, it will have run up $1,966,080 in a minute or over $2 billion in a single day. At this rate, it takes about a full year of quartz watch oscillations to spend $1.034 trillion. To illustrate the magnitude of this $17 trillion debt, it would require purchasing a brand new car every second for 17 years to run up this debt.

Any bets that our leaders who belong to the most elite and expensive clubs in the world will change their ways and balance the federal budget so they can purchase the cars with cash instead of borrowing and paying interest? This debt is unconscionable. I would not bet a single tick from my old watch that the national debt will EVER be paid off. Am I wrong? Or are WE enabling and eventuating a national bankruptcy that our children and grandchildren will have to deal with?