The national debt currently stands at $22 trillion dollars. That’s trillion – with a ‘T.’ Ten years ago, it was $10 trillion dollars. Ten years from now, it’s projected to be $34 trillion.
The interest payment on our debt is currently $300 billion dollars per year, heading towards a projected $1 trillion dollars within a decade. At that point, a fifth of all federal taxes will go towards the interest on the debt, not education, infrastructure, and defense – you know, the stuff government is supposed to do. And that’s with historically low interest rates. Imagine if those rates normalized. Well, maybe you don’t want to imagine it because that picture is very dark.
In a better world, voters would be marching on Washington, demanding that our politicians dig us out of this hole before we’re buried in it.
In the real world… almost no one cares. But we should care. And any thinking person, left or right, understands why. No individual and no nation can accumulate debt indefinitely. Europe was able to bail out Greece with some loans a few years ago. But Greece is a small country. If the US goes ‘boom,’ there’s going to be no one to bail us out. So what’s driving the debt? And, more importantly, how do we drive ourselves out of it?
The debt has been growing for decades. It got supercharged by the 2008 recession. Revenues fell while spending soared. Under President Obama, the debt doubled from $10 trillion dollars to $20 trillion. In the first two years of the Trump Administration, we’ve added another $2 trillion dollars.
So what are we to do?
First, we need to identify the primary source of the problem. It’s pretty basic. You can talk about defense spending, welfare spending, or bloated budgets all you want, but it really comes down to two programs: Social Security and Medicare. Unless we get a handle on these monsters, the debt blob will continue to expand until it overwhelms us.