That's the U.S. National Debt. 36 trillion denaros.

That's a lot of denaros, sure—but what does it mean? Too much? Too little? Goldilocks? No pretending to have definitive answers here, but what if we sprinkle in a dash of perspective and see what rises?

Numbers closer to everyday scale tend to make more sense, so perhaps looking at it per capita (whatever a capita is) is a good start. All that's needed is something to divide by—let's try the U.S. population:

That's a lot of capita! Did you know capita is the plural of caput—which is a technical name for the head? Who knew? OK OK, back on topic:

Technically it comes to $106,571.02, but since we's givine your our two cents here anyway, let&apso;s round it off to $107k per capita.

Question for you: Hey there, all you beautiful capita, I mean people: Got debt? Mortgage? Other loan? Credit card? If so, go ahead and add it up in your head—it's good mental exercise!

All done? Whatever your total, I bet you're short about $107k. Plot twist: the national debt is our debt. Yeah, we citizes are the country. And that debt (plus interest) is paid mostly by—you guessed it—us. You already knew this smartie, but seeing it on an individual level is something else.

But hold up. We used the whole U.S. population, no? And not everyone here is a citizen, yes? And some citizens live abroad, no? Well, yes.

It seems we don' have very accurate estimates here, so let's just round the population too, and estimate the number of actual U.S. citizens:

Now if we use this to work out the national per-citizen:

OK so about $112k per citizen, or about $5k more than the $107k from using total population. That settles it, yeah? Not quite I'm afraid. Since federal taxes pay the national debt, looking at who actually pays them matters. Authorized foreign workers also pay taxes. Dependents don't. To follow the money, the number of tax returns makes more sense.

Now we can figure the national debt per tax household:

If you're like most people (not the type obsessing over debt-per-tax-household figures), you might be feeling anywhere fromoutraged to unfazed right now, depending on your preferred brain programming channel. But before you rush to post that hot take, let's dig deeper.

First, this number is growing. Apparently by about $1 trillion every 100 days. Rounding to 3 significant digits, it works out to:

That works out to $116 per millisecond, or in realtime:

Fine, but it's hard to intuit numbers on a scale of hundreds of millions of people. So, we'll again divide by the tax return count to get it in scale:

Not quite as dramatic—had to resort to fractions of a cent to make it visible realtime. But $1,978 per month is far from pocket change, yeah?

But hold on—there's still more to this rabbit hole. First, federal income tax rates increase with income, so not every taxpayer shoulders an equal share of the burden. There are are also other types of federal taxes:

Despite the political rhetoric, all taxes are ultimately paid by people—whether directly, through lower salaries, or other means. But since politicians seem to struggle with this nuance, let's focus for now on individual income tax. It's the largest portion anyway.

Since the individual income tax accounts for 49.03% of the federal income, let's apportion it to the debt accordingly:

So it's safe to say that about $17,627,463,757,207 of the national debt can be "assigned" to the indiviudal income tax. Here is a rough breakdown of the tax revenue, split into the top 50% and bottom 50%:

As is clear to see, the bottom 50% accounts for a much smaller portion of the total. Before we revisit the debt burden, we need to calculate each categories share of total tax revenue:

Holy moly! The top 50% pay a combined 97.7% of the total tax revenue. How does this affect the per tax household burden?

WOW