on the National Mall in Washington Nov. 7, 2022. Fitch Ratings has downgraded the United States government’s credit rating, citing rising debt at the federal, state, and local levels and a “steady deterioration in standards of governance” over the past two decades.(AP Photo/J. David Ake, File)
I had only a ballpark idea of the
national debt
before this week. Like most people, I knew it was in the tens of trillions, which meant that it was already far beyond my practical computational powers. Without a tangible sense of scale, the mind simply drifts.
This week, the
Treasury Department
announced that America’s national debt crossed $34 trillion for the first time. This is a dark harbinger of things to come.
The country is regularly warned about the potential consequences of the national debt. It can wreck our economy through diminished investment, high interest rates, and persistently high inflation. It can increase international tensions, particularly when lenders are hostile foreign powers (
China
now owns roughly $1 trillion of our debt). It can threaten the social safety net, which is relied upon by the poorest in our society. Top line: the higher the debt, the greater the likelihood of long-term suffering.
But the sheer scale of the new national debt record renders the public incapable of responding with appropriate urgency. We’ve become numb to such numbers, and we have no clear sense of what they mean. The ordinary taxpayer sees no practical difference between $34 trillion, $40 trillion, or even $50 trillion, which is a threshold we are projected to pass by the end of the decade. If previous “records” didn’t alert America to the gravity of the problem, there’s no reason to think future ones will.
Sadly, the debt isn’t the only number of national significance that may as well be gibberish.
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