How Many Texases Can You Buy with the U.S. National Debt?

Have you ever had that one dumb question that keeps popping in your head? Well, for me, it's trying to figure out how many Texases could be purchased (assuming that was even possible) with the national debt of just over $38 trillion.

Since I'm so curious, let's do the math together.

How Much is Texas Worth?

In order to find our answer, we'll first need to know just how much Texas is worth. This is an incredibly loaded question, however, and there are a few ways you could evaluate it.

Also, it's important to note that U.S. states are not for sale. But we are going to pretend that we live in a world where any Joe Blow can walk in with a pocket full of cash and buy one.

For our purposes, we'll look at the estimated total of Texas' economy combined with the average cost per acre to estimate a price tag for the state.

Texas Economy

According to the Texas Office of the Governor website, Texas' economy is a whopping $2.7 trillion—the eighth largest in the world. 

Texas Cost of Acres

Also, as the nation's second-largest state by land mass, there are 171,902,080 acres within its borders. We can calculate the total cost of all acres by multiplying this number with the average cost per acre in Texas, which is roughly $4,700, according to Texas Farm Credit.

So, 171,902,080 x $4,700 = nearly $808 billion ($807,939,776,000)

Fun Fact: Costs per acre vary greatly depending on where you are in Texas. For instance, certain land in the Panhandle and the South Plains is priced as low as $1,890. When you look at prices along the Gulf Coast, however, you can expect to pay up to $9,200 per acre.

How Many States of Texas Could the National Debt Buy?

Now that we have our version of how much Texas is worth by combining the state's economy with the average cost of the entire state property, we can get our final answer.

Our nation's debt has recently surpassed the $38 trillion mark, and since it's constantly changing, we'll use 38 trillion for our equations to make it easy. Here we go:

Texas economy ($2.7 trillion) + average total acreage cost ($808 billion) = $3,508,000,000,000

$38 trillion divided by $3.508 trillion = 10.83

Finally, we have our answer. By using the money from the total U.S. national debt, you could potentially purchase 10 Texases.

Obviously, this number will be different if you go more in depth and get more specific. Also, we are not taking into account home prices, taxes, loss of revenue from the U.S. losing a state, etc., but for our broad purposes, it does the job.