Today, the US federal debt officially eclipsed $36 trillion, according to US Debt Clock. (Treasury Department data, which hasn’t been updated today, still has the figure at $35.97 trillion.)
This is just mere months after it famously eclipsed $35 trillion at the end of July. The Congressional Budget Office, Congress’s source for “nonpartisan analysis,” has warned about the deleterious “effects of waiting to stabilize federal debt.” As they point out, “As a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), federal debt held by the public is thus projected to climb from 102 percent at the end of 2021 to 202 percent in 2051. A perpetually rising debt-to-GDP ratio is unsustainable over the long term because financing deficits and servicing the debt would consume an ever-growing proportion of the nation’s income.”
On a per-person basis, a $36 trillion debt equates to $107,494.78 per person in the United States. To really let this sink in, this is per person and includes children, meaning that even children who are not old enough to express their opinions and values through voting are already saddled with over $100,000 in debt.
Another way to look at this is to think about it in terms of debt per taxpayer. The nation’s debt equates to $218,181.82 per taxpayer. The most recent data we have available reports that the median weekly earnings of full-time workers equates to about $57,150 annually. This means that the median person in the US must work for almost four years and give up every penny of their salary to pay off just their portion of the federal debt.
A nation, like a household, that is in debt can frame it as either a “spending problem” or a “revenue problem.” From an accounting perspective, it would be difficult to discern which this is. From an economic perspective, however, the answer is clear: Congress has a spending problem. If people followed Congress’s financial plan, they would have a credit card debt of over $445,000 against their income of $57,150. Just as we would dismiss out of hand a person who claimed that this was a problem of insufficient revenue, so too should we dismiss political pundits who make similar claims and put forth revenue boosting plans to try to bring Congress’s fiscal house back in order. And yes, that includes Trump’s plan to raise significant revenues via tariffs.
Rather than dwell on about what this grotesque debt does to our nation, I want to use this as an opportunity to put the staggering $36 trillion figure into perspective.