Imagine your family spent more this year than you earned. It wouldn't be comfortable, but you'd manage. Now imagine your family had spent more than it earned every single year since 2001. By now you'd be destitute.
Well, that is exactly 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 result is a national debt that now stands at $39 trillion.
In 2001, the United States owed less than $6 trillion. Today we owe nearly $39 trillion. That means the federal debt has grown by $33 trillion in just 25 years.
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 ran up $5.8 trillion in debt.
In the 25 years since, we have added $33 trillion more. More than four-fifths of the total debt has been acquired in the past quarter-century.
And it is getting faster. Of that $39 trillion, $2.7 trillion was added in just the past year. A staggering $10 trillion — more than 27 percent of every dollar America has ever borrowed — has been piled on in the past five years alone. The federal government now adds roughly $8 billion of new debt every single day.
Millions, billions, trillions. Our brains are not wired to grasp numbers this large, so let me put 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 something called the World Wide Web was just getting started.
A trillion seconds ago? That was around 32,000 years ago. Woolly mammoths still roamed Europe, farming had not yet been invented, and no one (we think) had yet made it to North America.
That is what a trillion looks like. And we owe almost forty of them.
Great nations are rarely destroyed by external enemies. They are more often destroyed by debt.
The historian Niall Ferguson has warned that when the crushing cost of servicing old debts begins to crowd 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 — sometimes called 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.
A few months ago, I was at the Ole Miss game in Oxford when a B-2 stealth bomber flew over the stadium. The crowd went wild. It was one of the most thrilling sights I have ever seen — a symbol of American strength, the kind of demonstration of raw power that not only keeps the United States secure but keeps the bad guys across the globe in line.
Each B-2 cost over $2 billion to build, which is why only 21 were ever produced. Keeping one in the air costs about $150,000 per hour.
The risk is that one day the United States — like Habsburg Spain — will simply not be able to afford the things that make us strong. And it isn't just the defense budget at stake. Will America be able to pay its Medicaid bills? Its pensions? Its Social Security obligations?
We pour enormous attention into elections and congressional redistricting. But unless we get the debt under control, none of that will matter.
At the start of President Trump's second term, I had high hopes. Elon Musk and DOGE talked seriously about reducing public spending. I hoped Congress might finally wake up and do its job.
But cutting spending alone will not be enough. We also need economic growth — and I am confident we are on the cusp of a massive AI-driven productivity boom that could deliver it. Spending restraint and growth, working together, could narrow the deficit over a decade or so. Eventually we could even begin to pay the debt itself down.
This — not the midterms, not the game of musical chairs over congressional districts — is what really matters.
Controlling the deficit will decide whether our children's children live better lives than we do, or whether we follow Europe down the path of higher taxes, rising costs, and demographic decay.