Math and the Federal Debt

The total US federal debt now exceeds 20 trillion dollars. A trillion is such a large number that most people have trouble even conceptualizing it. Think of it this way, there have only been 63,683,236,800 (~63B) seconds since the beginning of the common era 2018 years ago. One trillion seconds won't have elapsed in the common era until the year 31688.

Keep in mind, that's just one trillion. Our federal debt is 20x larger than that number and growing. In fiscal 2017 (which ended on September 30) we added $666 billion dollars to our federal debt.

In 2017 US GDP was approximately $19T. This means that our federal deficit spending added approximately 3.5% to our GDP.

Since almost all of the government's spending is a component of GDP, the balancing of our budget would result in GDP falling by 3.5%. The biggest exclusion of government spending from GDP is amounts paid to service its existing debt. In the last ten years US GDP growth has averaged 2.77%/year. Therefore, if we had balanced our budget each of these years, our economy would have shrunk instead of grown.

So when politicians talk about "balancing the budget" and "living within our means" we should ask them are they really willing to shrink our economy to do so?

As for paying off the debt - well you can forget about that. If we were to somehow balance our budget we would need to keep it balanced for the next 100 years and commit to paying down the debt at the rate of $200B a year. To put that in perspective, total US foreign aid was $22.7B.