Next time you get a spam call asking for donations, it might not be Rachel's Tomb — it could be the United States government.
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In America, everything is bigger.
Big house, big car, a bucket of chicken to snack on, and above all, a truly mind-boggling national debt.
"What do we do about this debt?" asked the government.
"How did we not think of this sooner," the government answered. "We'll just collect donations."
And so was born one of the strangest projects imaginable — an official government website that allows citizens to voluntarily donate money toward paying down the national debt.
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The project launched in 1996 and remains active to this day.
Over all those years, a grand total of $67.3 million has been donated.
Given that the national debt stands at around $37 trillion, those donations amount to roughly 0.0018% of it.
The national debt keeps growing at approximately $55,000 per second, which means $67.3 million covers about 20 minutes of it — and even that took nearly 30 years to collect.
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The idea is, admittedly, pretty terrible — and yet, in all the years since, no better solution seems to have been found, except perhaps the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has already managed to lose Musk, who headed it.
Pictured: a screenshot from the fascinating website usdebtclock, which summarizes the U.S. economy in numbers.