Thanks to Simon Black at Sovereign Man for suggesting we start measuring the national debt in what he calls "work years." As the name suggests, work years means how many years it would take to pay off the debt if every American man, woman, and child worked a job paying the average salary and the government took 100% of everyone's earnings and used it to pay down the national debt.

According to Mr. Black, it would take more than 398 million years to pay off the current national debt! Excerpts from the article below, you can (and should!) read the whole article here:

So let’s see—the Social Security Administration just released data for the average yearly salary in the US in fiscal year that just ended. It stands at $44,888.16.

The current debt level of over $17.9 trillion would thus take more than 398 million years of working at the average wage to pay off.

This means that even if every man, woman and child in the United States would work for one year just to help pay off the debt the government has piled on in their name, it still wouldn’t be enough.

Mind you that this means contributing everything you earn, without taking anything for your basic needs—which equates to slavery.

Now, rather than saying that the national debt is reaching $18 trillion, which means nothing to most people, you could say that the debt would currently take almost 400 million work-years to pay off. Wow.

When accounting for unfunded liabilities, the work-years necessary to pay off the debt amount to astonishing 2.38 BILLION work-years…

And the years of slavery required are only growing.

As an amount alone the debt is meaningless, but in terms of your future enslavement it can be better understood.

To put this in perspective even further—what was the situation like previously?

At the end of the year 2000, the national debt was at $5.7 trillion, while the average yearly income was $32,154. That’s 177 million work-years.

Again—wow.

So just from the turn of the century, we’ve seen the time it would take to pay off the national debt more than double. That means that more than twice as many future generations have been indebted to the system in just 14 years.