We are told that America’s debt is standing at $15 trillion. The truth is that is that is just a portion of our rapidly increasing debt. Many people do not know that America’s total debt stands at $57 trillion dollars. This “total debt” consists of America’s “unfunded liabilities,” in other words, government run programs.

Adding these two numbers together, America has a total of $72 trillion worth of obligations that we either own to foreign countries or to our own people, or that we simply have not yet set aside. To put this amount of money in perspective, if you were to add up one trillion seconds it would be equivalent to 32,000 years. That would make 72 trillion seconds equivalent to 2,304,000 years.

With this flabbergasting statistic in mind, the question arises: Why is the government in so much debt? The answer partially seems to be because the American mindset has become “the government owes us everything.”

But does it?