I have been listening to the news about Grexit and how bad things are in Greece and in Europe, in general, and I have been pondering about our own situation in this country, the good old US of A.  In addition to pondering, I started looking around to see if I could validate some of the claims being made by people that this could never happen to us, it's happening in Greece and Europe because they have mismanaged their affairs and so on.  Really?

So, Greece's public debt is ~400 billion dollars and the US's national debt is about 18 billion (http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/), but this would not, or could not happen here? Well, pundits will say, yeat but Greece is tiny country of about 10 million  and we are over 315 million, that's why our debt number is much higher, it makes sense, right?

Well, it turns out that according as of 2014 (last year), the per capita public debt of the USA is higher than that of Greece.  Yes, that's right, each one of us owes more money than a a person in Greece. While looking for that information, I also unearthed some other countries with a surprisingly high per capita public debt.  See if you agree with me:


Country Per Capita
Public Debt ($)
--------- ---------------
1 Japan 99,725
2 Ireland 60,356
3 USA 58,604
4 Singapore 56,980
5 Belgium 47,749
6 Italy         46,757
7 Canada 45,454
8 France 42,397
9 UK 38,938
10 Switzerland 38,639
11 Austria 38,621
12 Greece 38,444
13 Netherlands 37,233
14 Germany 35,881
15 Norway 34,910
16 Spain 30,031
17 Finland 29,930
18 Denmark 28,778
19 Portugal         26,770
20 Sweden 25,155

Here is the source: http://www.bloomberg.com/visual-data/best-and-worst/p/countries/japan