How much time does the United States Government and our society generally have left? The Market-Ticker answers.

Now how long do we have? That is, how much is a "doubling time"? That's easy too. We open up The Fed Z1 spreadsheet and Look at column Z1/Z1/LA314104005.Q, which is the Federal Government quarterly. Over the last decade that went from $3.284 trillion to $9.77 trillion, or 297%. This is roughly a 12% rate of increase annually.

The Rule of 72 tells us that this means that the debt at the government level, given what we're doing today, will double every six years. Don't believe me -- get out your calculator and check it.