Perspective: The US national debt is increasing by over $4b per day. If the $600b was used just to keep the debt from increasing it would last less then 5 months.
What a $100 billion can do - http://www.visualeconomics.com/what-bp-could-have-bought-wit...
On the other hand, maybe I don't understand what I'm talking about, and if so, please correct me.
Actually, it's not. Inflation is related to interest rates and the "value of the dollar", both of which affect our ability to pay off the debt, but the debt itself, the number of dollars owed right now, is independent of inflation.
> this pledge could reduce that significantly
It's less than 10% of the admitted debt, $8T, and that number is significantly less than the unfunded liabilities (SS, Medicare that folks think that they have pre-paid).
And most of those folks are giving their money to charity, not to govt, so it's not providing govt revenue that can be used to pay off govt debt.
In other words if the debt increased 0$ in a given year we would have effectively paid off ~3% of it.
PS: The actual increase in debt over the last few years has still been ridiculously fast. Defense-related expenditures outside of the Department of Defense constitute between $216 billion and $361 billion in additional spending, bringing the total for defense spending to between $880 billion and $1.03 trillion in fiscal year 2010.[7] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_S...) Basicly we are putting the entire DoD budget on Credit Cards.
Wouldn't it be funny, if at the end every nation/bank has the same debt to each other?
It comes down to whether the billions of dollars fund businesses or bureaucrats.