U.S. Debt Is Now More Than GDP of U.K., China & India Combined

NEW YORK (MainStreet) — Break out the streamers and confetti, but make sure it’s the cheap kind because we are broke. Really, really broke.

The U.S. hit a new milestone this week, passing $15 trillion in debt for the first time in our country’s history, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of the Public Debt. Right now, as I write this, the total debt is $15,026,993,847,879.10, which is more money than most of us will ever dream to make in our entire lives.

The total public debt first passed $14 trillion in the beginning of January, then hit the country’s debt limit of $14.3 trillion five months later and has only continued to go up since. The debt ceiling deal brokered in August allows the debt to increase by as much as $2.4 trillion, or a maximum total debt of roughly $16.7 trillion.

As daunting as the $15 trillion number is, it’s even greater than the country’s total output in 2010 as measured by gross domestic product, which was estimated to be about $14.58 trillion, according to data from the World Bank.

Just to put all that into perspective, our national debt is now greater than the GDP of each of the follow countries in 2010 put together:

Algeria ($159 billion)

Australia ($925 billion)

Austria ($376 billion)

Canada ($1.57 trillion)

China ($5.88 trillion)

Croatia ($60 billion)

Ghana ($31 billion)

Greece ($305 billion)

Greenland ($1.3 billion)

India ($1.73 trillion)

Lebanon ($39 billion)

Mexico ($1.04 trillion)

The United Kingdom ($1.6 trillion)

Add all that up and you get roughly $15.01 trillion, or about $10 billion less than the total U.S. national debt at this moment.

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