By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor
What is the U.S. National Debt?
According to most common estimates these days, it’s about $36.5 trillion.
People break up that number in several ways: it works out to about $107,000 per citizen, or about $323,000 per taxpayer.
Let’s stop right there for a moment.
How come only a third of our citizens are taxpayers? Obviously young children aren’t expected to be taxpayers, and very elderly retirees aren’t, but if a whopping two-thirds of our citizens aren’t paying taxes, that might be a clue to some of our problems.
Maybe those of us who are indeed taxpayers aren’t imagining things when we feel like we’re shouldering the burden for everybody else. Maybe we really are.
But now, back to the subject at hand: the national debt.
Is it really $36.500 trillion? Well, frankly speaking, no.
If you ask someone in the know who is unusually honest, he’ll remind you that a debt is an obligation you have committed yourself to paying, whether it’s happened yet or not. The $36.5 trillion figure doesn’t include the incredible additional commitments that the federal government has taken on that aren’t yet on the books, but will be, unavoidably, in the future.
The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School estimates that when you count both explicit and implicit debt, the number triples, making $92 trillion a more accurate number.
But wait, there’s more. Then they add the true cost of covering these promises and shortfalls, and the ”infinite horizon fiscal imbalance” turns out to be at least $162.7 trillion. At the moment. Until it goes up.
And yes, it is going up. Our national debt is continuing to climb.
Every year, our debt increases, because we’re running an annual budget deficit. So, in addition to starting the conversation with an unbelievable, insurmountable problem, we need to recognize that we’re not even improving it at all.
At least when you buy a house and take out a 20 or 30-year mortgage, or you buy a car and take out a five or six year auto loan, you’re paying down the principal along with the interest, every single month. There’s an end in sight, however far off it may be.
Not so with our federal government’s debt. Not only is it enormous (and probably much worse than the Wharton report above describes, since they are being conservative even in those massive estimates), we aren’t paying down the principal at all; the debt just continues to grow as we pay interest on this ever-increasing body of obligations.
We must also remember one more thing before we continue: this is all just the federal government’s obligations. That’s all we talk about, at the national level.
Even though states, counties, and cities theoretically must balance their budgets (because they can’t print money like the feds can), there are still ways for these other levels of government to take on unfunded obligations, sometimes to an incredibly irresponsible extent, such as promising generous pensions to government workers, and committing to provide free college tuition to non-taxpaying residents for decades to come. When the federal crisis really hits, don’t expect the cities, counties and states to be in any position to help out. Too many of the blue ones are just as bankrupt as the federal government.
One of the challenges in bringing up this issue is that it awakens the “deficit hawks,” an occasionally dormant group of liberals and moderates who join together to advocate raising tax rates to hopefully increase tax revenues, utterly oblivious to centuries of evidence showing that tax hikes crush an already overtaxed economy, making it harder than ever to pay off debt, not easier. The experience of not only the United States, but many other countries as well, is that cutting tax rates enables the kind of economic growth that makes revenues rise. We need tax rate cuts, not tax rate increases.
And on top of that, we need to reverse the rate of growth of the debt. Not just stop its climb, but truly reverse it by producing an economic surplus every year.
And that’s done in two ways: one is to cut the burdens of tax rates and overregulation – and the Trump Administration is working on both – and the other is to reduce government spending. Drastically.
How do you reduce spending? You look everywhere. You find everything. And you cut everything you find.
How many employees does the government have? Cut those numbers.
How many agencies and bureaus does the government have? Cut those numbers too.
How much power does the federal government have? Infinitely more than the U.S. Constitution authorizes it to have. So, cut that too.
How many illegal aliens are here, consuming tax revenue in a million ways, from crime to welfare, from education to healthcare? Reduce the number of illegals by enforcing the border and deporting the millions of illegal aliens already here.
How much money does the government just spend, without oversight, without analysis, seemingly without thought? Cut that too.
For many of us, specifically, for the conservative movement – from the libertarians of the 1960s to the Tea Party of the early Obama regime to the MAGA movement of today – this has been the prescription for over 60 years, and finally, at long last, it’s being done. We are doing real cutting at last.
The second Trump administration is going about it unconventionally; ordering new cabinet secretaries to undo ten regulations for every new one they add, using executive orders to undo bad Obama era and Biden era policies instead of just creating new spending and new controls, and using tariffs and the bully pulpit in an effort to quickly spur new manufacturing here at home, to quickly revive the multitude of manufacturing sectors that we’ve lost over the decades.
Yes, at the speed DOGE is moving, and at the rate the US Trade Representative is moving, and at the incredible clip at which the Secretary of State is moving, there may be the occasional mistake. Perhaps a tenth or a twentieth of those fired were great performers who shouldn’t have been fired.
But we just can’t afford to plod along at the speed at which our government class normally moves. If we were to ask each department to come up with names of people to let go and agencies to shutter or consolidate, they would take their time, and the reports of their recommendations would finally be published long after we are all retired or dead.
The Trump administration has chosen a route that nobody takes in Washington, at least not in this direction.
“Full Speed Ahead” is usually only shouted when building new agencies and new mandates, when adding new staffing and building office buildings to hold them.
“Full Speed Ahead” is never shouted by the taxpayers, by the auditors, and the budget-cutters.
But it is being shouted today, at last, and we may well discover that it’s finally happening, just in the nick of time.
As fans of economists Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, Leonard Read and Henry Hazlitt, the Right has always said that “we can grow ourselves out of this debt,” but in recent years, even we on the Right have begun to doubt the platitude.
Most of us had resigned ourselves to an unfortunate reality: that we can never grow ourselves out of this debt because no politician would be courageous enough to cut as deep as this obese leviathan requires.
And then, to our absolute amazement, from out of the Manhattan building market and the world of television reality shows, Donald Trump arrived on the scene. He may not do it all quite the same way we would, but he’s doing more to advance conservative policy than anyone else has in a century.
May Divine Providence watch over this administration; they’re doing yeoman’s work.
Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo
