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National debt grows at the speed of light

DEAR EDITOR:

Modern physics tells us that nothing in the universe can travel faster than the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles per second. That means light could circle the earth 7.5 times each second, reach the planet Mars in 14.2 minutes or get to the moon in 1.3 seconds. That is “cooking” along pretty fast!

America’s debt is now $25 trillion dollars and growing fast. That’s the number 25 with 12 zeros after it.

So let’s say each mile traveled by a beam of light is equal to one dollar of our debt. If we could pay off our debt at the speed of light or at $186,000 per second, how long would it take?

We could pay off one hundred million dollars ($100,000,000) of our debt every nine minutes, but it would still take an astonishing 4 years and 3 months to completely pay it off.

I think that’s an incredible number, and I hope it gives you some idea of just how large our debt problem is.

We should heed Thomas Jefferson’s advice, “To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.”

KEITH McCOMBS

Mineral Ridge

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