Veterans Day and the Debt Owed to Vets, and the National Debt -- Your Share of the Bill is $31,000 and Counting

I'd like to tell you how big the national debt is, but by the time I'd finish typing it out, it would already have risen by several million dollars.

The 12 trillion dollars works out to about $31,000 for every single American. It's looming out there like the iceberg ahead of the Titanic, and when the country hits it -- as baby boomers begin collecting Social Security and Medicare and government spending goes up while taxes do not -- it could sink us.

For most of an hour we talked to the members of the ''Fiscal Wakeup Tour,'' who I assigned roles as bassist, keyboards, vocals and drums, but who really represent ideologically wide-ranging groups from the Brookings institution to the American Enterprise Institute. The Concord Coalition should be the percussionist because it's been beating the national-debt drum for some years now. Each of the four agreed that there's no dispute over the arithmetic -- only the ideology, and whether political leaders and citizens will have the guts to cut spending and raise taxes.

Again, for most of an hour, we reflected on Veterans' Day -- Armistice Day, as it was known first, to commemorate the end of the First World War. We heard first from Matt Flavin. He is 29, a former Navy SEAL and veteran of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now he directs the White House Office of Veterans and Wounded Warrior policy, and he's not shy about telling President Obama how to deliver on his promises about seeing to the needs of veterans, who tend to have a higher rate of homelessness and joblessness than the rest of the population.

We also talked to vets at VFW posts in Santa Clarita and Canoga Park about what this day means to them and what more this country and its citizens could do to on the home front -- it's a lot more than yellow ribbons.

Next time, former vice president Al Gore sizes up how this nation is coming to terms with global warming and how he expects next month's climate summit in Copenhagen to go, and New Yorker writer Ken Auletta takes us into the virtual world of Google, the phenom that he says changed the world.

-- Patt Morrison