OPINION:
The national debt is very much like the weather. Everyone complains about it, but no one does much to fix it.
In 2009, when the debt was “only” $12 trillion, I led a campaign called “Defeat the Debt.” Our surveys showed most Americans didn’t understand the consequences of a $12 trillion debt. Most couldn’t imagine 1 trillion of anything.
Stack $100 bills until you reach $1 million. It will reach just over 3 feet. If you stacked $1 billion, it would exceed 0.6 miles, taller than the world’s tallest building (Burj Khalifa in Dubai).
If you stacked one trillion of the bills, they would reach 631 miles, or 2½ times as high as the International Space Station.
Now multiply that distance by 36. The growing national debt exceeds $36.6 trillion, a threefold increase since our 2009 campaign.
Today’s attitudes suggest denial, but just because you take the blue pill every morning doesn’t mean the Matrix is fake.
You have heard ad nauseam that the national debt is driven primarily by entitlement spending. Social Security and Medicare account for 95% of the federal government’s unfunded obligations.
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law in 1935, U.S. life expectancy was 60 years. Few people were expected to get payments.
Today, life expectancy is nearly 79 years. Even though funding has increased, Social Security was never structured to handle a pay-as-you-go program in which tens of millions of people are collecting benefits and relatively few young workers are paying taxes to support the system. More than 10,000 people are turning 65 every day. Not everyone stops working at that age, but the rising cost of Social Security is outpacing government revenue and economic growth.
Higher taxes won’t save America. Wealthy Americans already contribute more to Social Security than they take out, disproportionately benefiting low- and middle-income earners. The government can tax the top “1%” only so much.
Play a mind experiment and assume the government could somehow seize the net worth of the world’s richest person, Elon Musk ($320 billion). You would still need five Elon Musks to cover the Social Security payout of $1.6 trillion for 2025. What would you do next year? As Margaret Thatcher loved to say, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” Eventually, you start running out of billionaires to tax. Get too aggressive, and some will leave the country, much like people are incentivized to leave California, Illinois and New York for Florida and Texas.
There are no free lunches. Even if, in a fairy-tale world, we could keep Social Security solvent on our current fiscal path, we would still have huge Medicare shortfalls and required interest payments on the debt. That interest exceeded $1 trillion in 2024.
Even if 2024 was an outlier year and I used conservative math, our interest payments still consume about 40% of all personal income tax revenue. For the first time, the U.S. is spending more on debt service than defense. On the current trajectory, all income taxes may be dedicated to financing the debt interest alone by the 2030s.
I have spent decades engaged in issue advocacy. Early on, I understood the difficulty of motivating people to care about any policy. It is “STPC,” or “short-term personal consequences.” If a consequence is perceived as long-term or “not my problem,” too many people ignore the threat. It’s easy to assume tomorrow will be just like the day before, and sadly, many members of Congress are no better. They talk a good game and then spend more borrowed money, expecting others to figure out how to pay it back.
In my next column, I’ll discuss solutions to our sleepwalking toward the cliff.
• Rick Berman is president of RBB Strategies and is on the board of the RAM Veterans Foundation.
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