Richard S. sent me this link which discusses making tax-deductible donations to pay down the US debt, and though the program has evidently been around since the ’60s, I don’t recall it ever getting a lot of press and it’s funny that CNNMoney would start pushing it now, as the debt ceiling starts to approach infinity like those limits in my Calc 1 class, ages ago. I guess Sam really needs the scratch:

Under a little-known law enacted in 1961, Uncle Sam accepts tax-deductible contributions to pay down the country’s debt. Not that the Treasury Department does much to publicize the program.

You can find it under the header “Accepting Gifts” in the U.S. Code. Or, if you’re not an avid reader of dusty legal books, you can check the FAQ section on the Web site of the Bureau of Public Debt, an agency within Treasury. Or flip to page 91 of the IRS’ 2009 Instruction Booklet for Form 1040.

I had heard of this program before and have always been curious what types of people donated. A lot of gifts are from estates, so maybe this is what you do when you’re more concerned about the future of other people’s grandchildren than your own (those ingrates!) Others make small payments, a tenner here, a hundo there. One man is quoted as saying he thinks he can “help the government out”.

Your editors feel that sending a check to the public debt would be about as effective as spitting into the wind, and besides, when we have a little extra cash, we usually buy bacon, or vodka, or bacon vodka if we’re feeling particularly feisty (when are we not?), so yeah. Even the Bureau of the Public Debt’s spokesperson, Mckayla Braden, admits that even on a week with a flurry of donations, it means “[w]e might have to finance a tiny bit less that week”. And, even if $100 donations were de rigeur, it would take 120 billion $100 checks to pay the whole mess off, which is probably enough, when laid end to end, to reach from the Earth to the as-yet-undiscovered planet where there are 120 billion living beings capable of cutting this kind of check.

However, the situation might get brighter because pretty soon you’ll be able to donate on the internets:

You soon may be able to donate online. “We are going to make it very easy in the future to make gifts to reduce the public debt through Pay.gov on a regular basis,” Braden said.

May we suggest that they do like the programmers in Office Space did, and every financial transaction in the country gets  skimmed to the tune of a penny? It added up way faster than those guys expected. I mean, every little bit helps…