Imagining $14.3 Trillion in Debt

This guy does a pretty good job.   But the fact is that the amount of national debt, even if it were reasonable, would still dwarf planes and buildings, etc., because we're a big country.   300 million people can handle a lot of debt.   The real problem is imagining the debt we have now, not as a gross debt that dwarfs the Empire State Building, but the debt per taxpayer that dwarfs what we owe on our cars, our college loans, our houses.   As everyone ought to know, the real taxpayers (the top 10% who pay more than 70% of the income taxes) are the people who really "owe" the national debt, just like it's me who owes money we've committed to pay for my son's Catholic boys high school, not my son (who doesn't have any income).   Those top 10% (and that's just of the 140 million or so filers) are the real "debtors" who are going to have to pay the vigorish to the Chinese someday.   So there are about 14 million of us who are going to have to pay off the $14 trillion in national debt.   Now we're talking.... that's about $1 million per taxpayer in that upper income group.

Put it that way and it really does sound scary big.