Lisa Desjardins:
OK, the national debt, all of the money the U.S. government owes, is currently $31.4 trillion. But what does that mean?
For one, that's decades' worth of government spending, things like Medicaid and other health care, the U.S. military, food stamps, and other benefits, fixing roads, Head Start and schools, the environment, national parks, and 1,000 other areas.
It's simple. For years, what the U.S. government spent on those things was far greater than the amount of money it had brought in to pay for them. That stacked up to that $31.4 trillion in debt we have now. That's an enormous, almost nonsensical number.
So let's put it a different way. If all Americans pitched in, it would take $94,000 from each one of us, every man, woman and child, to pay off the national debt.
The U.S. national debt, in dollars, is by far the largest in the world. But we also have the largest economy in the world. And that is how most experts approach this.
Think of it this way. The national debt is a weight, sometimes a heavy weight, like a barbell at a gym. But what matters is not just the size of the debt, but the size of the economy, or person, trying to handle that debt. So, how big is our debt compared to the economy trying to hold it up?
Back in the year 2000, it was a relatively easy. The debt equaled 36 percent of the combined earnings, goods, and everything the U.S. economy produced that year. But it shot up, and now the U.S. is shouldering a national debt that is 98 percent of what we will produce this year.
And, much worse, if nothing changes, in 30 years, the debt is forecasted to soar to be nearly twice as large as everything the economy produces, a potentially overwhelming weight for the U.S. economy.
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