Check, Check, Check: How America and India Learned to Run on Debt — and Taught Their Citizens the Same
There is a number that should have stopped the world's traffic this week, and it passed with barely a shrug: the national debt of the United States crossed $40 trillion . Not the size of its economy — its debt . And here is the sentence that turns the number into a story: America has added roughly as much debt in the last ten years as it accumulated in its entire previous history. From George Washington to 2016 — through a civil war, two world wars, the Depression, the Cold War and the 2008 crash — the republic amassed about $19–20 trillion of obligations. From 2016 to 2026, in one placid decade of mostly peace and mostly growth, it added the same amount again. The last three administrations alone — Trump's first term (about $7.8 trillion), Biden's (about $8.5 trillion), and Trump's second (already past $3.5 trillion in eighteen months) — piled on roughly $20 trillion between them. The debt now works out to about $116,000 per American, $295,000 per household, growi...