The Way We Live Now: Gap-toothed. Too poor to get a falsie to complete our smile. Lawyers aren't making it! Kitschy yuppie bars on skid row are losing ambiance! Nine trillion dollars in debt is a lot. A lot.

Here is the situation as it now stands: Ted Martinez has been walking around New York for a year with a missing tooth because his unemployment checks aren't enough to cover getting a replacement. Students who took out a "ferocious amount of debt" in order to attend fancy law schools and go work as well paid corporate law drones for life are now questioning whether that was the right decision, since they can't get jobs. The entrepreneurial fella who wants to put an upscale bar on LA's skid row to take advantage of the entertaining "people going back and forth" outside is being forced to rethink, because "residents" would rather have a "grocery store" or something. And food prices are going up.

All of which would be only mildly alarming in a fiscally responsible nation like, say, Botswana. But here in the USA we really don't need these distractions. We'll have $9 trillion in debt over the next decade. That is, like, a serious shitload of debt. Too much debt for someone like you, a product of the American educational system, to wrap your warped mind around. Allow us to put this into perspective for you:

9 trillion seconds ago was 285,000 years ago—before the Republican Party was even created.
 A stack of $1,000 bills to equal $9 trillion would be 611 miles high—higher than the Eiffel Tower.
The US government collected almost exactly $1 trillion in income taxes in 2006. In order for the government to collect enough to pay off $9 trillion, your tax rate would have to rise by 900%—even higher than the current middle class tax rate.
 In order to have the league's payroll add up to $9 trillion, every single player on every single Major League Baseball team would have to be paid nearly $8 billion per year—even more than Derek Jeter is paid.

Think about it.

[Pic of a mere $1 trillion via]