By STEVE BRAWNER
In August, I started a column by writing, “The national debt reached a new milestone this week. Did anybody notice?”
At the time, the debt had surpassed $37 trillion as of Aug. 11. It has since passed another milestone. On Oct. 22, it climbed past $38 trillion. That’s another trillion dollars in two months and change.
Did anybody notice this time?
The debt grew so fast those two months because things had been building up over the previous six. You might recall the federal government reached the debt ceiling in January, and Congress and the president didn’t raise it again until July 4. Technically, Uncle Sam couldn’t add any more debt on paper during that time. However, the government continued spending more money than it collected, so it used accounting maneuvers to pay its bills. But even the federal government can’t do that forever – or even for very long.
The official budget deficit for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 was $1.8 trillion, according to the Treasury Department. At this pace, the debt will hit $40 trillion next year.
That’s a big round number that people tend to notice. People go through a midlife crisis when they reach 40.
Will the national debt’s “big four-oh” get anybody’s attention next year? Probably not much, based on the response to previous big numbers.
It’s all adding up very quickly. The national debt at the end of fiscal year 2000, which was 25 years ago, was $5.67 trillion. In other words, it has increased more than $32 trillion in a quarter of a century.
The Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a group advocating for fiscal responsibility, says the national debt is growing five times faster in the 2020s than it did in the 2000s. It’s gone from increasing by $1 trillion an average of every 716 days in that decade to $1 trillion every 145 days now.
The debt is growing by $6.9 billion per day, $288 million per hour, and $4.8 million per minute.
The number $38 trillion is so large that it means little to most of us. The Peterson Foundation has made it easier to grasp. It says $38 trillion …
– Equals about $111,000 per American;
– Equals the value of the economies of China, Germany, Japan, India and the United Kingdom combined;
– Would pay for a four-year college degree for every graduating U.S. high school student in America for 113 years
The government is spending about $1 trillion a year on interest payments on the debt. That’s another big, round number that people ought to notice. Interest payments are now the federal government’s second largest expenditure after Social Security. The government spends more on paying its creditors, including China, than it does on either defense or Medicare.
This is obviously a problem. Unfortunately, today’s elected officials – both Republicans and Democrats – aren’t creating meaningful solutions.
On one side, Senate Democrats this year have forced the longest-running government shutdown in U.S. history. They are doing this because they seek to extend Obamacare health insurance subsidies that they created during COVID.
There certainly is an argument to be made for continuing the subsidies in some form. Some Republicans are open to continuing them as well.
But nobody is talking about what other spending to cut, or what taxes to raise, to pay for that priority. Absent any other action, continuing the subsidies would add $350 billion to the deficit over 10 years, not counting additional interest costs, the Congressional Budget Office says.
Republicans, meanwhile, passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act earlier this year that added $4.1 trillion to deficits through 2034, counting interest. That number comes from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, another anti-deficit group.
Someday, something – probably a crisis – will make the nation’s irresponsible fiscal policies un-ignorable. Debt is like that. You can keep living the way you’ve been living – albeit with nagging guilt – until something, usually quite painfully, forces you to stop.
In the meantime, I guess we’ll keep sprinting past numerical milestones. At this pace, we’ll easily hit the “big five-oh” in a decade or less.
Think anybody will notice?
Steve Brawner’s column is syndicated to 21 outlets in Arkansas. Email him at brawnersteve@mac.com.