We all knew it, but here it is.

The GAO has discovered that the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare is not revenue neutral at all, but will cost the U.S. taxpayer 6.2 trillion dollars.

Now, if I am doing my arithmetic correctly there are roughly thirty one million five hundred and thirty six thousand seconds in a year. So, if we spend one dollar every second we are looking at dividing 6,000,000,000,000 by 31,536,000 coming to 190,258.75 years of spending. Almost two hundred thousand years! Think about that!

Civilization did not exist one hundred and ninety thousand years ago. It did not exist 19 thousand years ago. Mesopotamian civilization goes back to about 3100 B.C., or a little over five thousand years. (In fact, the legendary Gilgamesh ruled the Mesopotamian city of Uruk circa 2750 B.C. and is an  example of some of the very earliest written literature.) So the debt being run up by Obamacare will be equal to forty times as long as our entire civilization has existed assuming a spending rate of a dollar a second and with no compounding interest. Sadly, it will be far more - and this is just a COST OVERRUN.

This time frame goes back to "Eve" and her consort, dubbed by paleontologists Adam, the ancestor of all modern human beings.

This takes us back to the Pleistocene. Neanderthals wandered the Earth at this time. So did Mastodons, Mammoths, and Saber-Toothed Tigers. An ice age and interglacial occurred. We moved from abject barbarism, from stone tools, spears, and subsistent living to sending robotic probes to Mars, Titan, and to the heliopause at the very edge of our solar system. Man has moved from clubs, skin loincloths, and a hunter/gatherer existence to rockets, computers, and recombinant DNA. It will take that long to repay this Superjovian debt.

You think about that, think about it hard.

This is spending beyond any comprehensible level -- and it is just one program! It is spending that more befits geological epochs in terms of sheer numbers.

We should be grateful, I suppose, that the ancient cave men did not have their own Barack Obama; we would still be burdened with their crushing debt. I'm not sure where all the clam shells would come from.

Timothy Birdnow is a St. Louis based writer. His website is www.tbirdnow.mee.nu