On March 1, 2021, our National debt surpassed $28 trillion for the first time. That is $28,000,000,000,000 or approximately $86,000 per family in the United States.  That is per family whether they pay federal income taxes or not, many do not.

The U.S. Treasury Department tracks the current total public debt outstanding and that total amount increase every second. There is a debt clock in New York tracks it.

Our National debt is held in two, let us say two Grand Canyon-sized craters.  One is called “debt held by the public” and the other is intragovernmental debt.  Approximately two-thirds of our debt is held by the public. The government, which means you, owe this amount to buyers of U.S. Treasury notes including individuals, companies, and foreign governments.  

The remaining one-third is called intragovernmental debt. This is the debt our Treasury owes to various U.S. government departments that hold government account securities. The biggest owner is Social Security. Think of the movie Dumb and Dumber with Jim Carey.  In that movie, a woman accidentally leaves a suitcase full of cash and her limousine driver, Jim Carey’s character, sees that and attempts to get it to her before she borders the plane but fails.  Jim and his roommate go on a cross-country journey to find the woman and return her luggage.  When they accidentally find that the luggage is full of cash they start spending all of it.  When they return the luggage to the woman it is filled with IOU’s.  That is what our government is doing to our Social Security accounts as well as others.

Here is the scene in which he tells the bad guy not to worry every dollar they spent is covered by their IOU's:

Here are some recent examples of our put of control spending:

  • August 31, 2012: $16 trillion
  • Oct. 17, 2013: $17 trillion
  • Dec. 15, 2014: $18 trillion
  • Jan. 29, 2016: $19 trillion
  • Sept. 8, 2017: $20 trillion
  • March 15, 2018: $21 trillion
  • Feb. 11, 2019: $22 trillion
  • Oct. 31, 2019: $23 trillion
  • April 7, 2020: $24 trillion
  • May 5, 2020: $25 trillion
  • June 9, 2020: $26 trillion
  • Oct. 1, 2020: $27 trillion1

To put our total federal debt into a very scary perspective let us look at it this way. 

How many years are 28 Trillion seconds?

The answer is…………..877,266!

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