Yesterday, August 19th 2026, marked a milestone as the U.S. officially hit $40 trillion in national “debt”. That’s $40,000,000,000,000.
That is a pretty big number.
I put “debt” in quotes, and assume those for the rest of the post, because debt is something you owe and in general it is expected you will repay. No one has seriously believed the U.S. would repay the debt, not ever.
Without going into a Ron Paul-esque screed about fiat currency not backed by anything more substantial than “Trust us bro”, the ugly reality of money is that it is entirely a fiction. A dollar bill is worth a dollar because we all agree that it does. The money held in checking accounts is completely imaginary. For the average person virtually all of their transactions, from getting your paycheck to buying groceries to paying bills, happens via a series of electronic transactions. Most of us don’t even pay taxes in the sense of writing out a check, it is taken magically from our imaginary paycheck.
Now I am not suggesting we return to a strictly barter economy of course. The use of a medium of exchange like money is easier than some guy showing up with a truck full of boards to trade for a truck full of corn. The problem is that so much spending is done via funds that just don’t exist.
This is accelerating at the Federal level. I had Grok make me a chart of the national debt over the last 25 years.
We first hit $10 trillion in debt in 2008. To add another $10 trillion in debt, doubling to $20 trillion, took 9 years in 2017.
The next $10 trillion debt milestone happened around 2021, so only 4 years thanks to “pandemic” spending.
To get from $30 trillion to $40 trillion took right around 5 years.
In 2008, not that long ago by my reckoning, the U.S. was “only” $10 trillion in debt but today is quadruple that figure.
Also worth pointing out, DOGE notwithstanding, Donald Trump has overseen more “money” added to the national debt that any other President to the tune of $11.6 trillion and he still has a couple of years to go….
A very significant percentage of that debt was created in the service of outright fraud, including and especially in the military as our trillion dollar a year armed forces have been basically run out of the Middle East by Iran.
A question I have asked before….since Federal spending has absolutely no relationship to tax revenue, why bother collecting taxes at all? Why not just keep spending imaginary “money” and adding to the national debt to pay for government spending?
The answer is pretty obvious: taxing your income is a way to siphon from the productive class, bringing them down to the level of the dependency class. It isn’t really about “paying your fair share” or “equity”. It is just punishment for being a kulak.
There is nothing to be done about the national debt. It will keep swelling and interest payments will keep taking an increasing share of the “budget” so they will borrow to pay the interest and on and on. The only question is when does the end come and who will be left with a chair?
