August 2024

Thirty-five trillion.Wow, that’s a really, really big number -- big enough that it deserves my exploitation of it as the entire opening paragraph of this column.OK, so add “dollars” after that really, really big number if you must, or put a dollar sign before it, as in “on July 26, the US national debt pass the $35 trillion mark.”That feels like a real milestone -- around $7 trillion more than last year’s Gross Domestic Product, which supposedly represents the value of all goods and services produced in the US -- but it didn’t generate nearly as much panicked media notice as I’d expected it to.Maybe the American press is a bit distracted by the weirdest presidential campaign season in decades (and that’s saying something!).Or maybe the national debt has just grown so large, and its growth accelerated to such speeds, that it’s become the usual and really only merits the “footnote and yawn” treatment these days.I’m old enough to remember when American politicians engaged in vigorous public hand-wringing about their debt (all the while, of course, pretending it was YOUR debt), occasionally even tinkering with tiny spending cuts or not so tiny tax hikes to “do something” about it.Those days are long gone.