Ronald Reagan asked this question less than two minutes into his first address to Congress in 1981, excoriating a government willing to mortgage the future of its citizenry via a national debt of $1 trillion. Reagan invited the American people to visualize this "incomprehensible" sum not as a string of numbers but as the cold, hard cash it actually was. "If you had a stack of thousand-dollar bills in your hand only 4 inches high, you'd be a millionaire," he said. "A trillion dollars would be a stack of thousand-dollar bills 67 miles high."

Consider: In November, the Republican majority in Congress passed legislation on a near-party line vote raising the government's debt limit to $8.18 trillion, a figure close to 70 percent the size of the entire U.S. economy -- at the urging of a Republican president regarded as the ideological descendant of Reagan. Shortly thereafter, the White House issued a statement "commending" Congress for this action. There was no mention in it of a now 500-mile-high stack of thousand-dollar bills. If this Captain believes the ship of state was out of control, he wasn't letting on.