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. (RELATED: Why Does Congress Keep Kicking the Fiscal Can?)
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. (RELATED: How Did We Reach a $38 Trillion Debt During a ‘Shutdown’?)
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 40 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.
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