LinkedIn on Thursday, August 27, 2026
$40 trillion and counting?! Costing us $1 trillion per year, approximately $3000 per person, $12,000 per family of four – just to pay the interest on our national debt.
Forget about Donald Trump and the likes of Stephen Miller. These people are fast on their way to being barely memorable footnotes in the history of our country. If anything ever takes America down, it will the gross financial irresponsibility with which we’ve managed our national debt.
As you have probably heard, our national debt has exceeded $40 trillion dollars. Let’s be more specific about what’s happened. I’m going to use round numbers to make them easier to remember.
Since 1946, 80 years ago, the year after the end of World War II, our national debt has risen every year except 1947, 1948, 1951, 1956 and 1957. At the end of September in 1957, our national debt was only .27 trillion dollars. It’s gone up every year since then. Since 1958, national debt has increased continuously at an average rate of 7.6% per year.
As a nation, we borrow money to pay the interest on the money we have already borrowed. That’s how broke we are. …All the Trump vanity projects? The billions for ICE? The war, whatever, we have going on with Iran? They’re all being financed with borrowed money that is increasing our national debt.
Round numbers, given a national debt of over $40 trillion and our current population of over 340 million, we owe $115,000 per person, $460,000 per family of four.
“So what?” you ask. “It’s not as if the country is in the same trouble we would be in personally if you and I had signed for all that debt.” Actually, yes it is and don’t let any politician tell you otherwise.
The interest we’re paying on all this national debt is $1 trillion a year, $2.8 billion a day. Without incurring any additional debt, we’d have to tax every American an average of $3,000 per person per year, $12,000 per family of four per year, just to pay the interest on our national debt. That’s not happening, so we borrow more money just to pay the interest on our national debt that that keeps growing, increasing the amount of interest we need to pay our lenders. It’s not meaningless.
Last year alone – referring to the federal fiscal year, October 1, 2024 through September 30, 2025 – we borrowed an additional $1.8 trillion. Keep that number in mind. We borrowed $1.8 trillion to cover our federal government deficit, which is basically the amount we spent over and above the tax revenues we collected.
That $1.8 trillion is the amount of additional money we would have to collect from all of us were we to balance the budget, to stop spending more than we collect. $1.8 trillion divided by population of roughly 340 million people is $5,300 per person, $21,200 per family of four – additional taxes that we would need to pay. Every year until we start balancing the budget.
The point is that we need to start balancing our federal budget, so that we can stop borrowing money – except in the most real and serious national crises. But… And this is a big “but.” We can’t stop borrowing too quickly, too abruptly, or the effect on consumer demand of all those additional taxes and/or the societal impact of the reduction in government services – the costs of which have created our deficit spending in the first place – will crush us, economically and socially.
What do we do? Well, we need to balance the budget, as quickly as possible, but gradually so as not to hurt ourselves too badly in the process.
And we need to increase the taxes paid by our highest income families and companies to increase government revenues and reduce our deficit spending.
Why go to all this trouble? Because if we don’t and something happens that causes the countries and private entities to stop buying the bonds we sell to borrow money to finance our debt, we’ll have no choice but to balance our budget immediately. In the crisis that follows, we won’t be able to borrow the money we need to stabilize the economy. We’ll just have to take the hit and, to put it very mildly, that’s going to hurt a whole lot of people, with serious implications for the world economy as American demand for foreign goods and services collapses. How bad will it be, particularly for middle and lower income families? It’s hard to tell precisely, but think in terms of a serious, tsunami-level recession at precisely a time when government support based on borrowed funds will no longer be possible.
If other countries want to “put us in our place” as the expression goes, all they need to do is stop buying our debt.
So, we need to work as quickly as possible toward having balanced budgets. Raise taxes paid by the highest income families and companies. And, in the meantime, let’s see if we can’t refinance our current debt to lower our debt service substantially from the $2.8 billion per day in interest we’re now paying.
It might even make sense to consider taking the United States government public. That’s right, very thoughtfully selling dividend paying stock in America and using the proceeds to pay down our national debt. Selling stock to American citizens only – with the notable exception of government officials? Who knows, except that we need to get creative. Needless to say, we need economic and social program planning like our government has never done before.
Are we up to it? What do you think?
One additional note… By law, the President of the United States is required to submit a proposed budget, for the next fiscal year, to Congress by no later than the first Monday in February. The final draft of that budget is to be in place by no later than the October 1 of the current calendar year which is the start of the next federal fiscal year. …The last time we had a federal budget, balanced or not, that was ready on time was in 1996, 30 years ago. Maybe if we just stopped paying Congress until the budget was ready, they’d pick up the pace and do more to get it done on time. And if the administration was dragging its feet? Congress would just have to order the President to hustle up.
One thing’s for sure. If we don’t start talking and thinking seriously about lowering the national debt and the debt service on it, it’s only going to keep getting larger, becoming an increasingly more dangerous existential threat for everything we’ve built and hold dear.
-Les Cohen
