How to Explain a Trillion Dollars of National Debt to Your Household?
LONDON, July 11, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --
If you thought explaining the facts of life was difficult, try explaining a trillion dollars! "The numbers are just too big," says Craig Salmon, "That's why I came up with http://worlddebtclocks.org."
He went on to explain his new website which launched this week, "It's easy, just select your country, select how many live in your household, then from behind the curtains you are shown what you could buy with your share of the country's national debt."
"It's quite frightening really, name any country?" France I replied. He quickly selected France from the homepage, "The French government could buy every four-person household in France a brand new Porsche 911, could you imagine looking down the road and seeing such a sight?"
Well yes I can, and I could also imagine the speedboat the UK government could buy my three housemates and I back in London. That's what is so good about this website, it puts the current debt crisis into perspective so that anybody can understand.
As well as showing you what your household could buy with their share of national debt, World Debt Clocks also has a section with interesting facts and figures. Have you ever wondered what you could do with the physical cash of a countries debt amount?
For example, if you were to lay $1 bills on top of each other totalling the US debt, you would have a pile over 1 million miles high, which is equivalent to almost 4.5 trips to the moon!
In contrast the Greek debt would amount to a pile only 32,000 miles high, which doesn't sound a lot. However, if you were to wrap the notes around the earth instead of stacking them you could do so over 1,800 times!
So to round up, a picture says a thousand words and he's done a great job to get the message over, whilst keeping the hours and hours of research and mathematics firmly hidden behind the curtains. World Debt Clocks is well worth a visit and I would recommend it to any intellect or casual web surfer alike.
Who is Craig Salmon? Craig has just finished university with a degree in Computer Science at the University of Kent. http://worlddebtclocks.org is his first project in developing educational web sites explaining current affairs and problems with minimal words. His next project will be live at the end of the year.
Contact: Craig Salmon
Email: crs@berex.co.uk
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