How $1 trillion every five months is reshaping America’s fiscal future

The U.S. is carrying more debt today than at any point in its history, and the pace of that growth is getting faster and faster each year.  

A recent Treasury report announced that the total national debt is now over $37 trillion, a sum that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.  

$37 trillion can be hard to conceptualize. Here’s what it looks like in practice:  

$110,000 

If you split the national debt evenly among all Americans, every man, woman, and child would be on the hook for about $110,000. For the average person, that’s over two and a half years’ salary. 

2.5 million miles 

If, for some reason, we tried to pay off the national debt in cash, we would need a 2.5-million-miles-tall stack of dollar bills.  

That’s tall enough to get us to the Moon and back… five times.  

123%  

The national debt is now 123% the size of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a broad measure of the size of the economy. In other words, the U.S. owes more than what we have.   

5 months 

The U.S. adds $1 trillion to the debt every five months. For perspective, It took nearly two centuries — from the founding of the republic in 1789 to 1982 — for the U.S. to accumulate its first $1 trillion in debt. 

Two-thirds 

While the debt has been a long-term issue, it’s exploded recently. About two-thirds of today’s $37 trillion debt has been added in just the last 15 years – under both Democratic and Republican presidents.