Imagine your family spent more this year than you earned. Uncomfortable, but manageable. Now imagine your family had spent more than it earned every single year since 2001. By now you would be destitute.
That is what the federal government has been doing. For the past 25 years — ever since Bill Clinton left the White House — Washington has spent more than it has taken in. Every single year. The national debt now stands at $39 trillion. In 2001, the United States owed less than $6 trillion. Today we owe nearly $39 trillion. The federal debt has grown by $33 trillion in just 25 years. Here is the worrying part. In the entire 212 years from George Washington's first inauguration through Bill Clinton's last day in office — through the Civil War, the Great Depression, two World Wars, and the Cold War — the United States accumulated $5.8 trillion in debt. In the 25 years since, we have added $33 trillion more. More than four-fifths of the total debt the country carries today has been borrowed in the past quarter-century. Our brains are not wired to grasp numbers this large. So consider it another way. A million seconds ago was about 11 days ago — late April. A billion seconds ago was 32 years ago, in 1994, when the World Wide Web was just getting started. A trillion seconds ago was about 32,000 years ago. Woolly mammoths still roamed Europe. Farming had not yet been invented. No one, so far as we know, had yet reached North America.
That is what a trillion looks like. And the United States owes almost forty of them.
The pace is accelerating. Of that $39 trillion, $2.7 trillion was added in the past year alone. Ten trillion —
more than 27 percent of every dollar America has ever borrowed — has been piled on in just the past
five years. The federal government now adds roughly $8 billion in new debt every single day.
Great nations are rarely destroyed by external enemies. They are more often destroyed by debt. The
historian Niall Ferguson has warned that when the cost of servicing old debts crowds out the essential
investments that sustain national strength — especially defense — decline becomes almost inevitable.
History is littered with cautionary tales. Habsburg Spain. Bourbon France. The Ottoman Empire. Each
was once the greatest power on earth. Each was overstretched by debt.
Ferguson identifies a critical threshold — what some now call the Ferguson limit — beyond which a
great power cannot long survive: the moment a nation spends more on debt interest than on defense.
At that point, fiscal arithmetic begins to dismantle geopolitical power. The United States is now flirting
with that threshold.
A few months ago I was at the Ole Miss game in Oxford when a B-2 stealth bomber flew over the
stadium. The crowd went wild. It was one of the most thrilling sights I have ever seen — a symbol of
American strength, the kind of demonstration of raw power that not only keeps the United States
secure but keeps adversaries across the globe in line. Each B-2 cost over $2 billion to build. Keeping one
in the air costs about $150,000 an hour. There are only 21 of them.
The risk is that one day the United States — like Habsburg Spain — will simply not be able to afford the
things that make us strong. And it isn't just defense. Medicaid. Social Security. Federal pensions. Every
one of them depends on the United States being able to roll its debt at manageable rates.
Cutting spending alone will not be enough. We also need growth — and an AI-driven productivity boom
looks increasingly likely to deliver it. Spending restraint and growth, working together, could narrow the
deficit over a decade. Eventually, the debt itself could begin to be paid down.
This — not the midterms, not the next round of congressional redistricting — is what really matters. It
will decide whether our children's children live better lives than we do, or whether we follow Europe
down the path of higher taxes, rising costs, and demographic decay.
Douglas Carswell is President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. Mr. Carswell is the author of this post.
This post was sponsored by the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.
3 comments:
we are a generation away from some SERIOUS economic problems
This article begins with an analogy to how a family does finances. And that's the problem. Washington DC does not operate like a family. They think it's just one big money trough, and the debt they leave is someone else's problem. To effectively deal with debt, you first must do something about what causes it and what is adding to it. That's politicians. No matter how much income the government takes in, politicians will always spend every penny of it and always borrow more, just so they can spend more. And as we have seen so many times, when they hit their borrowing limit they just change the limits.
Well, its going to be difficult to make America great again with the explosive growth in debt over the last couple of years.
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