The $40 Trillion Suicide Note
The United States of America has crossed a threshold that should every citizen. The United States national debt has now surpassed $40 trillion. That is not a typo. It is not a projection. It is the official figure recorded by the United States Treasury — $40 trillion. This is not merely an accounting inconvenience. It is an existential threat to the Republic, more immediate and more certain than climate change, foreign wars, street crime, or the ideological fever dreams of democratic socialism.
We are on a trajectory toward the worst economic collapse in American history, and almost no one is treating it with the urgency it demands.
Consider the scale. $40 trillion equals roughly the annual economic output of China, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and India combined. It represents a debt of approximately $117,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country — or nearly $300,000 per household. The debt is growing at a rate of roughly $7 to $8 billion every single day.
Interest payments alone now consume hundreds of billions of dollars annually, money that cannot be used to build roads, fund research, or strengthen national defense. We are paying more and more simply to keep the lights on in a house we can no longer afford. American no longer ha a triple-A rating from any agency. That means the cost of borrowing money increases.
History provides the perspective that the present moment refuses to acknowledge. It took the United States nearly two centuries, from the founding through the early 1980s, to accumulate its first trillion dollars in debt. The second trillion arrived more quickly. The leap from ten trillion to twenty trillion took about nine years. From twenty trillion to thirty trillion required only five. The most recent ten trillion arrived in roughly four years. The acceleration is not gradual. It is exponential. Wars, recessions, and pandemics have always produced spikes. What is new is the permanent structural deficit driven by entitlement programs that expand without limit and without serious political resistance.
The arithmetic is unforgiving. And yet the media and political establishments shrug and moved on to the next culture-war skirmish. The public, conditioned by decades of government checks and benefits, does the same.
That public indifference is the most dangerous element of the crisis. The so-called welfare side of the federal budget has gone completely off the rails. Mandatory spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and related income-support programs now dominate the federal ledger. These programs are not subject to annual appropriations in any meaningful sense. They grow automatically. They are politically sacred. Any serious proposal to restrain their growth is met with howls of cruelty. Discretionary spending, including national defense, is the smaller and more contested portion of the budget. The real engine of insolvency is the entitlement machine.
One can, and should, blame the tax-and-spend politicians who have treated the national credit card as an infinite resource. Both parties have been complicit. Democrats have treated expanded benefits as moral imperatives disconnected from fiscal reality. Too many Republicans – pleading for fiscal responsibility – participate in the spending spree.
Yet the deeper responsibility rests with the electorate. A greedy public elects politicians who promise more money, more services, more redistribution, and more protection from economic reality. The voters reward those who deliver the largest immediate transfer and punish those who speak honestly about arithmetic. The government has hooked the public on the continuous flow of benefits, and the public has reciprocated by demanding ever larger doses.
The comparison to other threats is not rhetorical exaggeration. Climate change, whatever its long-term effects, does not currently force the Treasury to refinance trillions at rising interest rates. Foreign wars, however costly, remain discrete events with beginnings and ends. Crime, however corrosive, does not compound daily through the bond market. Democratic socialism, however destructive in theory, has not yet achieved the practical power to rewrite the fiscal rules of the largest economy on earth. In fact, socialist policies are a major driver in federal spending. The debt is different. It is already here. It is already growing. And it already constrains every other national priority.
Imagine a family that has borrowed against every asset, refinanced every obligation, and now spends more on interest than on food or shelter. The parents continue to promise the children larger allowances and more gifts because the children have come to expect them. The parents know the trajectory ends in bankruptcy, yet they lack the courage to tell the children the truth. That is the United States in 2026. The children, in this case, are the voting public. The parents are the political class. And the bankruptcy, when it arrives, will not be a gentle restructuring. It will be a brutal recognition that the promises cannot be kept.
The trajectory is clear. Without a fundamental change in the growth of mandatory spending and a corresponding shift in public expectations, future generations will face a fiscal crisis of historic magnitude. Interest costs will crowd out other spending. Markets will eventually demand higher premiums for American debt. The dollar’s once-privileged status will erode. The social fabric, already strained by political division, will fray further under the pressure of broken promises and reduced living standards. This is not alarmism. It is arithmetic.
The $40 trillion debt is the nation’s suicide note, written in increments of billions and signed by a public that prefers comfort today to solvency tomorrow. The politicians who enable it are guilty. The media that ignores it is negligent. But the public that demands the benefits and elects the benefactors bears the ultimate responsibility. Until that truth is confronted, collapse remains not a possibility but an inevitability.
So, there ‘tis.
All the more reason to sharpen the pencil and remove people from the entitlement rolls. Also government paid abortions should be stopped. I’m all about monies for people who are citizens and through no fault of their own are disabled. But paying social security for people who are alcoholics? Hell no!!!! The lists is too many to count. If I tried to list them all Frank Danger would have no room to post his rebuttal. LOL. But jokes aside, if the radical democrats win in November, we ain’t seen nothing yet. Don’t doubt me. And some of them are making remarks about fighting us in the streets to force us to comply. But when I say out of my cold dead hands I really mean it. Can I get an amen ?
Nobody ever wins elections based on cutting funding. This is much tougher than it seems, and the crisis may sink us before we have political will to fix it.
Something must be done or our country is going to be destroyed
Yesterday, after the proper Fed rate hikes, Trump said rates should be 1% AND that we could instantly rake in $1.5 trillion just by ending trading with countries we run a deficit in. Trump said it would be easy.
In the words of the immortal Micky in Rocky II: “what are you waiting for, take this.” That’s right, why is Trump even blinking an eye IF he could do this. I don’t know about you, but a free $1.5 trillion look berry berry goot to me. Otherwise, sure seems a TACO moment.
Are you better off than under Biden, financially? Because my finances are tougher, and my culture is being cancelled so NO.
Joe and the ho did nothing for my financial situation. Yes. I’m better off with Trump. In many ways. It’s not the government’s job to make us wealthy. It’s up to us to do the best we can. It’s no big deal if someone works two jobs. Been there, done that.
To respond in kind, Dan and his ho may indeed be better off financially under Trump, especially if he kept his job or traded up for a new one. He says “in many ways,” and I ask: so name a couple. Like higher wages, lower costs, or better investments. Some specifics.
Yes, it’s not the government’s job to make us wealthy, it is their job to turn what levers they can in the economy when appropriate.
On average, Trump has put his hand on the scale in many wrong ways and few right ones. You may be better off, waiting for some specifics though, but, on average, we are better off under Biden than Trump. Financially. Most of us. Only the uber rich are much better off under Trump than Biden. According to statistics.
Joe and the ho did nothing for my financial situation. Yes. I’m better off with Trump. In many ways. It’s not the government’s job to make us.
FYI: my last year in college, I took a full boat and worked five or six part-time jobs; what’s your point?
Try these guys, recognizing the rhetoric leans a bit left, but numbers are numbers: *https://cepr.net/publications/the-biden-boom-and-trump-slump-a-serious-comparison-of-the-two-economies/*
Much of our economy is manufacturing. The Biden administration added more than 775,000 manufacturing jobs. In Trump’s first term the US suffered a net loss of ~200,000 jobs in first term; according to the White House, manufacturers added 58,000 jobs in 2026, driven by demand in defense, pharmaceuticals, and technology.
Under Biden, federal laws like the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act caused factory construction spending to nearly double. Under Trump, many reshoring announcements, but few new factories as tariff-laced material costs surged.
Most other stats: GDP, new wars, deficit, debt, spending, personal debt, mortgage rates, all worse under Trump. He also added, via, tariffs, far more taxes on the average man than Biden.
Unemployment, beyond the covid blip, pretty flat meaning Trump not better. Same for inflation, which since cumulative seems even worse under Trump now.
Wages: Trump wins on this one, but has inflation on his side.
So, glad you are doing better. I too have increased wealth, but clearly am not doing better under Trump than Biden given, as an investor, I have moved to fixed assets given the hectic, herky-jerky illogical market with Trump putting his hand on the scale all over the place, plus the debt has caused me to reduce risk. In equities I have made more money playing Trump than playing market statistics.
I think $5K per person for over a trillion in total to buy votes will help. The insanity of the Felon King continues.
Larry writes this story without mentioning all thise deficit building tax cuts from Reagan, Bush Jr, Obama, and the worst: Trump. Over a trillion there too, but Larry ignores.
Plus he forgot the metric that monitors the issue: the debt/gdp ratio, used by both parties to attack debt since 1945 but basically ignored since Reagan; more so by Republicans where Trump fails miserably.
I have said here, now for years, that this is our greatest problem, one that could literally send us to the the economic dark ages overnight. It could be worse than the great recession. and it is both parties problem, only both parties can fix it. It took us 35 years the first time we exceeded 100% in the debt/GDP ratio starting in 1945 after World War II and ending around 1980 when Ronald Reagan began the upward trajectory that has never gone down since. I often said that I believe we can beat 35 years to fix this thing, but it will be decades clearly.
I agree with Larry’s bottom line of our deep debt kimchi and totally agree that it’s up to the electorate to solve; there seems to be some inaccuracies in the manner how he gets there. It is the prime directive of the Congress, as specified in the Constitution, to manage the finances of the country, the purse if you will. If not managed well, the electorate should fire them and find people that will focus on finances and know how to do it. For example, my NJ representative, LaMonica McIver, has no education, no experience in controlling any purse beyond her own. She can’t spell the word ledger; we should fire.
But Larry seems inaccurate in some of his assumptions and skips a few most important pieces of evidence. In one instance he seems to fall prey to faulty logic when he compares family debt to sovereign debt. In the same way people often compare almost anything to selling cars, people always compare government economics to individual or family economics. Some major differences like last time I checked, families cannot print fiat money. Families cannot take their retirement savings, invest it in themselves, spend it all, and then take a loan on the depleted investment to spend it again, on themselves. The other instance is when he treats Social Security as just another garden variety entitlement . It is a unique sovereign financial instrument, bar none, soup to nuts. It’s an entitlement, insurance policy, retirement plan, Ponzi scheme, and more, where simultaneously we invest in ourselves, borrow from ourselves, give ourselves special rates, rules, and regulations all around: all things no individual can do: logically or legally.
Debt itself is not necessarily bad depending on the returns. For example, if I build a bridge for a million but it lasts 100 years and generates tens of millions, probably a good debt. But if we gamble more than we can afford to lose, that’s bad, weakening our dollar, making everything more expensive. We can even throw ourselves into recession or even depression. To measure the risk of our debt, most use the concept of debt to GDP ratio. It is sort of like showing how you can borrow what you make. Not quite, but close enough. Larry does not mention Debt to GDP, a fundamental for any discussion of sovereign debt. Smart guys got together and decided the “witching hour” for the ratio is 100%; other experts can prove that with data showing failing nations exceeding it, but I don’t believe it’s necessarily so. Our own example says it ain’t necessarily so or we would be dead in the water already. Think of 100% as The Twilight Zone, a sign post up ahead, where your next stop may not be recession but total economic collapse that topples The Great Recession and Depression combined. Fact is nobody knows where the tipping point is because it’s when our investors, especially foreign, pull out and/or the dollar becomes crap that we can’t print fast enough. This time, so far, we stay afloat because like Richard Gere wiped out, about to be washed out in An Officer and a Gentleman, begging to stay: our investors “ain’t got nowhere to go, they got nowhere to go.” But when they do, they will leave in an instant and it will all collapse.
Previously I showed how bad this is to fix, being over 100%, and the fact it took the Greatest Generation over 35 years to bring it down from similar 100% highs as today resulting from war loans starting in 1945 until Reagan changed the trajectory from down to up, a trajectory that no President since has changed, Clinton blunted for a bit, and Republicans, especially Trump, are the worst offenders.
Larry’s other egregious error is to tell us that cutting spending alone is the cure. It isn’t. The US needs to cut cost and raise revenues at the same time. Yup, we must raise taxes. For decades. And if Larry adds that cutting spending will benefit the economy to the point of raising enough revenue, he would be wrong: it never has. Not enough at least.
The following numbers are highly debatable but directional. It’s complex stuff with many arguable estimation theories, but the Reagan tax cuts are seen to have added $2T In deficits. The Bush tax cuts $5.5T in deficit, and the all-time winner, Trump added $4.5T and still counting at this time. Democrats are part of this as well like Obama not rolling back the Bush cuts, he overtly extended them. And Biden added some corporate taxes but did not roll back the Trump cuts; window dressing. Meanwhile, our tax rate is less in 2020 and has been falling since 2013. We pay a 40% discount in average effective tax rate in 2020 over 2000. The top bracket pays 37% tax rate today. In 1944, post WWII, the top bracket paid 93% until 1963 when it dropped to 70%.
You can’t bring down the deficit by spending cuts only; the math does not work. PERIOD.
Bottom line: focus on finances. Fire folks who can’t handle finances. Raise taxes, cut spending. I even support a TEMPORARY balanced budget law given caveats for ending IF decent Debt/GDP Ratios are met.