Can you spare a few bucks?

By a few, I mean only about $30,000. Many Americans carry no personal debt though the ones who do, help drag the average credit card debt to around $9,000. A very high minority (over 40%) spend more money than they earn with the average American spending roughly 105% of what they earn. With our existing concept of debt and spending, grasping all of these numbers and their personal impact is not easy.

What's that mean to you?

It means almost $30,000 in debt for each man, woman, child and infant in the United States.

Even if you've escaped the recent housing and credit crunches and are coping with rising fuel prices, you may still be headed for economic misery, along with the rest of the country. That's because the government is fast straining resources needed to meet interest payments on the national debt, which stands at a mind-numbing $9.13 trillion.

And like homeowners who took out adjustable-rate mortgages, the government faces the prospect of seeing this debt -- now at relatively low interest rates -- rolling over to higher rates, multiplying the financial pain.

So long as somebody is willing to keep loaning the U.S. government money, the debt is largely out of sight, out of mind.

But the interest payments keep compounding and could in time squeeze out most other government spending -- leading to sharply higher taxes or a cut in basic services like Social Security and other government benefit programs. Or all of the above.

Without any visible impact on our day to day life, it's hard for most of us to get our heads around such numbers. There are few incentives for politicians to even try addressing a complicated and unpleasant issue like this. Will it matter? I guess we will find out soon enough. What do you think? Important or irrelevant?