Incomprehensible.

Headline this week at the Associated Press.

The US national debt now stands at $40 trillion.”

The problem with “trillion” is that it’s incomprehensible. Trillion is a number that in more sane times was used for expressing the distances in miles between galaxies. It’s a number so huge, so out of the realm of ordinary experience, that when we hear it, it just bounces off.

Yet, it’s a number now used routinely when discussing the finances of the United States.

To grasp the significance of debt expressed in increments of a trillion we must do the equivalent of what they taught us in math class about simplifying fractions. We must reduce numbers on this scale to terms we can comprehend.

So, here’s my attempt at such reduction in the hope of getting to the place where discussion of our national debt doesn’t just bounce off.

In May 2023 I wrote in this space about the debate in Congress regarding the urgent need to raise the U.S. legal debt limit from what was at the time $31.4 trillion. That was, as I write this, 1,204 days ago.

We’re now at $40 trillion – an increase of $8.6 trillion. (Now be honest, that did just bounce off, didn’t it?)

So, let’s try this. What that $8.6 trillion increase in just 1,204 days means is that the U.S. government has spent more money than it has taken in – and covered that spending with borrowing – at the rate of roughly $83,000 per second.

To give some proper perspective on that statistic, consider that the median annual U.S. household income is roughly $83,000 per year. Wrap your head around the fact that the U.S. government borrows more in a single second than the typical American household makes in an entire year.

Now consider this. If you listen to this essay on the air at KTBB, borrowing money at this rate means that from the time I start until I finish, the U.S. will have borrowed another $17.4 million. That’s nearly five times as much as the typical American household will earn in a 45-year working lifetime.

To be brutally fair, we must clearly state that administrations of both parties are guilty as sin on this. And to be brutally accurate, we must further state that the problem is not because of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill or “tax cuts for the rich,” much as Democrats will try to make you believe it is. Tax revenues rise every year.

And no, we can’t “DOGE” our way out of it. Totally eliminating waste and fraud – something that will never happen – won’t solve the problem.

The problem is that the two biggest drivers of our deficit spending – and they are really big – are Social Security and Medicare.

That makes two things true. First, painful, unpopular decisions about these “third rail” programs are looming, like it or not. And second, it’s on us and us alone.

Politicians are not going to solve our spending problem if we continue to insist on not letting them.