Thinking about the economy, the deficit and everything else just seems to lead me to a general miasma of numbers which are too large to really understand, so I took advantage of my job as a software tester with a visual analytics company to try to make sense of it all. The results weren't pretty, but seemed worth sharing with everyone else.
Here is a visualization showing the massive scale of the debt.
Perhaps the most stunning realization of all was that even during the best of the Clinton-era surpluses, we weren't managing to make a dent in the principal.