A Trillion Dollars in Interest, and Nothing to Show for It
A plan you cannot read is not a plan — it is a dream.
When we talk about the national debt, a few things flood into my head.
Ever since the late 1970s I've heard people say the national debt would collapse the American economy — that the world as we know it was about to end. It hasn't happened. Forty-five years. People still lend us money. We still borrow when we need to. We still spend.
So if you've quit listening to people who panic about the debt, you're not stupid. You've just noticed that some people like to panic about the debt, and you've decided to look at the reality you actually live in instead.
But the debt is a problem. It's just not the catastrophe people want you to believe it is. In American politics, somebody always wants you to believe it's an impending disaster and that it's the other guy's fault. Every Congress in my adult life has run a deficit, under every combination of who held what. This wasn't done to us by one side. It was done by the whole institution, over decades, with all of us watching.
And the problem isn't the impending catastrophe. It's that the interest is eating us alive.
Let me give you an idea
From the first of October 2024 through the thirtieth of September 2025 — fiscal year 2025 — the federal government took in a little over $5 trillion and spent about $7 trillion. The deficit for the year was about $1.8 trillion. (U.S. Department of the Treasury. (2025).)
Of that $7 trillion, $970 billion went to interest.
Now, there are reports that we've crossed a trillion dollars in interest. I'm not going to use that number. Let's use the $970 billion that's already on the closed books. (Congressional Budget Office. (2025).)
And remember what that is. We didn't build a road with it. We didn't provide disaster relief. We didn't hire a nurse in a VA hospital. We didn't recruit a single Soldier, Sailor, Airman or Marine. We didn't pay anybody who works in Congress. None of it. And we've already spent $970 billion.
Now let's sort that out. There are about 340 million people in this country. If you figured it at three thousand dollars a head, that's a little over a trillion — more than the interest bill, so the real number is lower. Do the math and it comes out to about $2,800 for every person alive in this country today.
If you're a family of four, your family owed more than ten thousand dollars in interest alone that year.
Twenty-eight hundred dollars for every man, woman and child in the country, every year, for nothing. Just to pay for money we already spent.
Think about that. If you were running your house like this, somebody else would own your house and your car, and you'd be selling blood.
The Federal Reserve tracks what a household spends just to pay the interest on its debts, and it runs about ten cents on every dollar coming in. The federal government spends almost nineteen. Nearly double. (Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. (2026); Peter G. Peterson Foundation. (2026).)
How did we get here?
In fiscal 2010, debt held by the public was around $9 trillion. It's over $30 trillion now. Three times as much in fifteen years. (U.S. Department of the Treasury. (2025).)
Over most of those years the Federal Reserve had its rate near zero, and we were borrowing almost for free. But those bonds are coming due. And anybody who's ever had an adjustable rate mortgage understands what happens next — to pay off the old bonds we have to issue new debt, and the new debt has a new rate, and it's a lot higher. Our interest isn't like the fixed-rate mortgage I have on my house. It resets.
We all watched what that does. In 2008, enough families lost their homes to resetting adjustable rate mortgages to take almost the entire economy down with them, and that was one slice of one market. The federal debt is the same instrument, running under the whole U.S. economy.
What an entitlement is
Now look at the whole budget instead of the part most people are angry about.
Of that $7 trillion, almost two-thirds is mandatory spending. That's what some people like to call entitlements — and it's called an entitlement because I am entitled to it. I've paid into Social Security since I was about twelve years old, and I draw a Social Security check now. I think that's perfectly reasonable. I've paid FICA — the Federal Insurance Contributions Act, which became Medicare when it was broken out from Social Security — every working year of my adult life. I'm entitled to that care. And I'm entitled to some veterans' benefits, not a lot of them but some, because that was the agreement I made with the government when I went into the Air Force.
That's what an entitlement is. It's a thing that was paid for.
Though I'll tell you what happened to my deal. When I started paying in, full retirement was sixty-five. Congress moved it in 1983, and my year landed at sixty-six and a half. Eighteen months of retirement benefits I paid for but didn't get. At fifteen hundred a month, that's more than twenty-five thousand dollars, because they couldn't balance a budget. (Social Security Administration. (2026).)
Two-thirds of every dollar the federal government spends is already promised to people it made a deal with. Call it sixty-six cents.
Another fourteen cents goes to interest.
That leaves about twenty cents on the dollar. Out of that twenty cents comes every staffer in Congress. Every FBI agent, DEA agent and immigration officer. Everybody in the White House. Every member of Congress's salary. Every Soldier, Marine, Airman, Sailor and Coast Guardsman. The Forest Service. The Social Security office workers who help you file. The disaster relief crews who show up after a hurricane.
All of it, out of twenty cents.
And here's the trap. You can't reform an interest program. There's nothing to reform. It's just interest. It shows up no matter who's in charge, or who sits in which office. It doesn't care. It just is.
Tomorrow
There are two answers people give to this. One says spending discipline will fix it. The other says raising taxes will fix it.
Neither one will, and you don't need a degree in economics to see why. That's tomorrow.
Read the enrolled bill: Economy, Cost of Living, and Inflation Stabilization Act of 2029 (ECLIA Act)
Sources
U.S. Department of the Treasury. (2025). Final Monthly Treasury Statement of Receipts and Outlays of the United States Government for Fiscal Year 2025. https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/static-data/published-reports/mts/MonthlyTreasuryStatement_202509.pdf
Congressional Budget Office. (2025). Monthly Budget Review: Summary for Fiscal Year 2025. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61307
Peter G. Peterson Foundation. (2026). The Current Federal Deficit and Debt. https://www.pgpf.org/programs-and-projects/fiscal-policy/monthly-interest-tracker-national-debt/
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Household Debt Service and Financial Obligations Ratios. https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/DSR
Social Security Administration. (2026). Retirement Benefits: Full Retirement Age by Year of Birth. https://www.ssa.gov/benefits/retirement/planner/ageincrease.html
Social Security Amendments of 1983, Pub. L. No. 98–21, 97 Stat. 65.
Federal Insurance Contributions Act, 26 U.S.C. § 3101 et seq.
Ginsburg 2028 • Arc 001 Economy, Cost of Living & Inflation • Morning post — companion to PP_08: Government Spending & the Deficit • presrun2028.net
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