300 words lavin
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Have you looked for any websites or videos that help break down the debt information to “normal” terms (meaning, smaller numbers so we can understand them better)?
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When I see such large numbers like the national debt I just sit and look at it and try to comprehend what it says then after that it sort of takes me back. How could a number be that big then again it is for the whole country and that is way out of control. There are small numbers for instance when I work on trust loans here I see how much some people really have and I think wow how do you get that amount and not touch it but it is a trust. The last few amounts I have done loans on have been 800,000.00 and 1,150,000.00 these numbers are very large compared to anything I would ever have.
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You ask some great questions in your response. We are “paying” on the debt, but we are only paying interest, not the principal, and we are only paying part of the interest. Imagine you buy a car. You borrow $10,000 to buy the car and the interest is 10% (we’ll use easy numbers to see), so you owe $1000/year in interest. Let’s say you can only afford $600/yr on the car. Then at the end of the first you, you still owe $10,000 for the car, plus the $400 in interest you didn’t pay, so your “bill” goes up to $10,400. Now imagine this on a MUCH larger scale. This is a basic idea of how it’s working with our national debt. Does that help?
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According to our text page 337 “powers of 10 are important because they are used in science to express numbers that are either very small or very large in absolute value.” I think that the national debt is rising because there is so much going into it and nothing being paid off and taken away. When this happens the amount tends to rise making the national debt more and more. An example would be b + 10 to the 3rd power where b + 10 n the n would be an integer. It’s a little hard to make the n to the power. I think that when we try to take a standard equation and turn it into a scientific notation that is more difficult then just leaving it alone and working it the standard way. you lose numbers when you do it that way.
