The National Debt

 

At this writing, the Debt stands at $36.7 trillion dollars, and the 2024/25 Deficit is projected to be around $2.5 trillion, so we can reasonably round that off at $40 trillion for a current National Debt.

Considering the rate that deficits have grown in recent years, and after backing out the additional $3.5 trillion caused by poor handling of the Covid situation, one can easily imagine the current National Debt doubling by the end of this decade. But to whom does the government owe that?

About 20% of it is a paperwork shuffle, including various accounting aberrations with branches of the government owing each other, but the other 80% is real money owed to the public[i]As Senator Everett Dirksen once said, “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it begins to add up to real money.”, and the public is mostly domestic individuals and foreign governments, like Japan and China.

The domestic folks are less of a problem because when the government goes broke, they will just delete your 401K[ii]The current National Debt spread over the current 342 million citizenry comes to around $120,000 per person or a half million per family.. The real problem is China. By the end of this decade, they will own $2 trillion in US government securities. That’s roughly equal to all of the gold in Fort Knox plus the State of Alaska. They might be willing to settle for central California since they already own 400,000 acres of farmland there, but I am pretty sure they would not want Hollywood.

By: Jim
Written: April 13, 2025
Published: April 13, 2025
Revised:
Reader feedback always appreciated[iii]… thoughtful commentary perhaps more so than shallow thoughts
footnotes
footnotes
↑i As Senator Everett Dirksen once said, “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it begins to add up to real money.”
↑ii The current National Debt spread over the current 342 million citizenry comes to around $120,000 per person or a half million per family.
↑iii … thoughtful commentary perhaps more so than shallow thoughts