Well, this is embarrassing, I left my wallet in my other jacket. Would you lend me $40.41 trillion?
Of course you won’t. How on earth would I ever repay you? I clearly don’t have the collateral to borrow against. But by October 2026, the US has been able to borrow $40.41 trillion without too much trouble.
The US government’s first ever loan was finalized in February, 1790, with the US borrowing the grand sum of $19,608.81. By 1829, that debt grew to $58 million, but by 1835, President Jackson had reduced the debt to $0. But a year or so later, the government started borrowing money again and by 1989, the debt had grown to $2.86 trillion. And in the years since, the debt has sky-rocketed to the $40.41 trillion I mentioned above.
So, why are lenders happy to lend more money to the US when it seems to be quite irresponsible with its money management?
Because the US can offer excellent collateral to gurantee their debt. The American workforce. They may not be the most productive in the world, but they’re in the top 10, and they power the world’s biggest economy. Without the American workforce, the US would struggle to borrow $1.
By the middle of 2026, the wealthiest 10% of Americans had hoarded $127.95 trillion. More than three times the national debt. While the poorest 50% shared just $4.14 trillion or about one-tenth of the debt.
US governments, both Republican and Democrat, have been borrowing money like a drunk student on Spring Break. Yet clearly the majority of Americans have only received a small fraction of the money borrowed using them as collateral.
Imagine I used your name and social security number to borrow $118,853. When the bank started charging you interest on a loan you didn’t receive, you’d be absolutely furious.
Yet, that’s effectively what multiple US governments have done.
It’s like identity theft on an industrial scale. The government has taken out a huge loan, signing the forms with the faked signatures of 170 million workers, and then given almost all of the money to Americans who don’t even need to borrow money. While the taxes of the poorest Americans have to go towards paying the more than $1 trillion interest due each year.
And those interest payments are only going to get higher, because the debt isn’t going to get smaller. Tax cuts from 2025 alone are projected to add almost $5 trillion to the debt by 2035 and who knows how much will be added on top of that? If it just increases at the same rate it has since 1989, when it was a relatively manageable $12.43 trillion, that’s going to add another $6 trillion, making a grand total of more than $52 trillion by the middle of the next decade.
Guess who will receive most of that borrowed money and who will be expected to pay the interest.
So, why don’t the poorest Americans care where all this borrowed money is going?
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