$40 TRILLION | FROM OUR GENERATION #68

The national debt crossed $40 trillion this week. Divided across 340 million Americans, that is roughly $110,000 per person. At a 3% interest rate, each person's share of the debt costs about $3,000 a year in reduced standard of living. For a family of four making $100,000, the burden is 10 to 12%. For a family making a million, it is 1%. The debt is the most regressive tax in America, and no one voted for it. The trajectory is accelerating. The country hit $1 trillion in 1980. By 2002, it was $6.4 trillion. In the same span of time since, it has reached $40 trillion. Each 22-year period multiplied the debt by roughly six. Under Reagan, $200 billion annual deficits were treated as a crisis and discussed constantly. The current deficit exceeds $2 trillion a year and draws almost no attention. The economy is not collapsing. Unemployment is low, job openings are high, and incomes are growing faster than inflation. But the affordability pressure is real and growing. Health care costs continue to rise faster than every other category and are now large enough to affect every family. Energy costs compound the problem because they are embedded in the price of everything else. The debt itself functions as a slow bleed: not crushing yet, but accumulating in a way that narrows the margin for error. Economic convulsions are not theoretical. The late 1970s saw inflation above 15% and mortgage rates that froze the housing market. The 1980s produced a real estate bubble driven by tax shelter depreciation rules that left cities with years of empty apartments. The dot-com crash wiped out trillions. The 2008 recession was built on millions of no-documentation mortgages issued to people who could never make the payments. Each crisis had a different trigger, but the underlying pattern is the same: debt and distorted incentives compound until a shock forces a correction. The Democratic Socialists are not the fringe of the party. They are the energy. James Carville, who publicly said he would not be in a party with them, reversed course three days later and endorsed DSA-backed Senate candidates in Michigan and Florida. Only eight House Democrats signed a letter opposing elements of the DSA platform. John Fetterman remains the only Senate Democrat openly refusing to go along. Every Democrat aspiring to the presidency now calls for abolishing the Electoral College. The platform includes packing the Supreme Court with six additional justices, granting citizenship to every undocumented immigrant, and mailing ballots to every household. These are not policy proposals. They are structural changes designed to make reversal impossible. The Federal Register, the book of all federal regulations, reached 106,000 pages under Biden. Trump has cut it to 60,000, the first time in living memory that the regulatory burden has actually shrunk. He has also reduced the federal workforce by 300,000. That is why the institutional left hates him in a way it never hated Bush or Romney. Those presidents left the machinery intact. Trump is dismantling it. For more episodes and resources, visit ⁠fromourgeneration.com⁠. Dive deeper with Giants of Political Thought at ⁠giantsofpoliticalthought.com⁠.