14 trillion dollars in debt

That's what America's combined debt level is (for mortgages, car loans, personal loans and my favorite - credit cards) according to a BBC report. I couldn't quite find a way to link back to the exact article as they don't have embedded video links. But there basic Business site is:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/default.stm

In my opinion, that is just absolutely ridiculous - Americans as a whole are in more debt than our GOVERNMENT although they're only about 5 trillion dollars behind.

What is a trillion anyway though?

Here's an interesting link I found:

http://100777.com/node/455

Here is an excerpt from the above link:

"The U.S. government spends more than the entire Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Australia, China and Spain combined. If you laid one dollar bills end to end, you could make a chain that stretches from earth to the moon and back again 200 times before you ran out of dollar bills! One trillion dollars would stretch nearly from the earth to the sun. It would take a military jet flying at the speed of sound, reeling out a roll of dollar bills behind it, 14 years before it reeled out one trillion dollar bills.

What is frightening is that government will continue to grow in America unless citizens prevent it. If government stays on the course it's been on for the past forty years without a radical change, the federal government will have a $10 TRILLION BUDGET by the year 2010."