When the Treasury Department announced earlier this week that the U.S. national debt had reached $40 trillion, the major mainstream media (MSM) outlets reported it as a genuinely foreboding development.
The New York Times, for example, felt compelled to tell readers the new debt total "topped $40 trillion for the first time on Wednesday, an ominous milestone for an economy that sits on a shaky fiscal foundation after decades of borrowing to pay for the rising costs of the military [and] social safety net programs..."
(The Old Grey Lady still couldn't resist lumping "President Trump’s tax cuts" as a prime cause, despite the fact the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects federal revenues will be at least seven percent higher for Fiscal Year 2026, the first year of those tax cuts, than they were in 2024, the last year of the Biden administration.)
At ABC News, editors posted the Associated Press (AP) dispatch that resisted the temptation to follow the Times by using the $40 trillion milestone to take another shot at Trump. Instead, the AP laid out the basic facts in an impressively cogent fashion:
"The national debt surpassed a record $40 trillion on Wednesday, a staggering milestone as defense costs, social programs like Social Security and Medicare and interest on the burgeoning deficit make up an enormous share of federal spending."
Interestingly enough, the conservative media went into greater detail regarding the causes and responsibility for reaching the $40 trillion mark, but essentially portrayed the news in the same manner as the MSM outlets.
The Daily Caller News Foundation pointed to "Members of Congress [who] bemoaned the $40 trillion national debt Thursday that they helped create," and observed that "Republicans and Democrats pointed fingers at each other after the debt surpassed $40 trillion. They voted for legislation that contributed to the debt, including $3.4 trillion in the One Big, Beautiful Bill (OBBB) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)."
Over at Fox News, the $40 trillion debt level was described as a “historic milestone” amid persistent federal budget deficits, and paired the report with commentary about affordability and spending cuts. Others in the right media universe provided similar coverage.
But every one of those media outlets, across the MSM and the right media unquestioningly reported the total debt figure as the government did, at $40 trillion. Now, don't get me wrong: $40 trillion is a horrendous level of debt, one that imposes a staggering financial burden on the American people for decades to come.
Here's the problem: That $40 trillion figure is $136 trillion short! The actual total national debt is more than $176 trillion. At that level, each and every federal taxpayer is liable for $1.1 million in outstanding debt.
How could every media outlet across the ideological spectrum get it so wrong? Because the Treasury Department's official figure for the national debt does NOT include future promised-but-unfunded Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement benefits, according to Truth in Accounting (TIA), the Chicago-based financial analysis non-profit.
"Truth in Accounting’s analysis of the most recent audited Financial Report of the U.S. Government found its overall financial condition worsened by $11.6 trillion in 2025. The mounting debt burden of $170.3 trillion represents the total benefits promised to citizens, yet the federal government has no clear idea where the money will come from to pay for them. This staggering debt translates to a $1.1 million liability for every federal taxpayer, resulting in the federal government receiving a failing grade for its fiscal health," TIA reported in April.
(Note: When TIA issued its April report, the total exceeded $170 trillion. In August, when TIA compared its calculation to the Treasury estimate, the total had reached $176 trillion.)
Based on official documents, here's how TIA broke out that $170 trillion:
* Unfunded Medicare Benefits — $74.5 trillion
* Unfunded Social Security Benefits — $54 trillion
* Publicly-held Debt — $30.3 trillion
* Pension and Retiree Health Care Liabilities — $15.5 trillion
* Other Liabilities — $2 trillion
I'm no economist, but one need not have attended Harvard or Yale and received a PhD in the "dismal science" to figure out this country almost certainly will never recover from the spending and debt explosion that started in 2016, when the Treasury's estimated debt was $19.6 trillion under Trump, and then exploded under his successor, Joe Biden.
Here's why: The mandatory annual interest cost of the debt today is $1 trillion, but that doesn't cover the future costs of borrowing to pay for those currently unfunded benefits both parties have incurred since LBJ's War on Poverty commenced in 1965.
Even if enough spending cuts were enacted and maintained every year to pay off current borrowing costs and then reduce the total debt owed by $500 billion, it is inconceivable that the federal government would have a genuinely balanced budget before the 22nd century.
Maybe we Americans could generate enough economic growth to fund such an effort, but does anybody reading this really think there will be enough sustainable political will to carry such a debt payoff campaign to a successful conclusion?
Adam Smith, the great Scots father of free market economics, understood these matters centuries ago. In his "Of Public Debt" chapter of The Wealth of Nations, Smith observed:
The progress of the enormous debts which at present oppress, and will in the long-run probably ruin, all the great nations of Europe has been pretty uniform ... When national debts have once been accumulated to a certain degree, there is scarce, I believe, a single instance of their having been fairly and completely paid.
That man knew us better than we know ourselves today.
Editor's Note: The Democrat Party has been infected by socialism, and it's spreading FAST. Democrats are claiming there's nothing to worry about, but we know the truth.
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