What Have We Gotten For $30 Trillion In Debt?

When the next President is inaugurated in less than a year from now the United States will have added $30 trillion in debt within a generation.

In fact, almost $2 trillion in additional debt has been added just since the debt ceiling limit was suspended by legislation passed in June.

The United States had just over $4 trillion in debt in 1992. Just over 30 years later we will have hit $34 trillion in debt.

Louis Gave is an economic and market research analyst from France who speaks and writes about global markets and trends.

He recently asked the question as to '"What has the United States gotten for $30 trillion in debt?

It is a great question.

Let's break it down and put some context around it.

The United States got a lot for the $4 trillion in debt in the seven generations or so from the nation's founding until the early 1990's.

We completed the Louisiana Purchase that doubled the land mass of the U.S. We opened up the West through railroads. The union was saved in the Civil  War. We purchased Alaska. We established most of the nation's national parks. We won two World Wars and saved the world from despotism. We overcame the Great Depression. We built the Hoover Dam. the Tennessee Vally Authority was established and we have an interstate highway system to show for it. We put men on the moon. The debt we took on to achieve those results looks like a bargain today.

It is harder to point out anything real tangible that we have to show for the $30 trillion of debt we have added in the last generation.

We spent a bunch of money in Afghanistan over a couple of decades and then abandoned it and a whole bunch of military equipment to Muslim extremists. We paid a lot of people to not work during the Covid lockdowns. We funded a vaccine that turned out to be ineffective and mandated that people had to take it or lose their jobs. We spent a pile of money on green energy projects that have largely not panned out. For the most part, we funded a lot of social programs with trillions of dollars of borrowed money only to see little change in levels of  poverty, homelessness, out of wedlock births and the health of the American people.

Debt is constructive when it is used to produce something that will provide a continuing return on that investment. Debt is destructive when the money is spent but there is nothing to show for it that produces a return that can be used to pay off the debt and interest in the future.

What have we gotten for $30 trillion in debt?

It does not look to have given us much of tangible value.

To put this in further context consider the fact that the amount of money that the federal government spent on Covid initiatives and relief payments through borrowed money was more than the total cost (inflated into current dollars) to fight and win World War II.

Source: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/covid-costs-more-than-world-war-impacting-securities-markets-2021-03-18

Considering that almost all of these Covid costs were the result of the economic lockdowns I doubt that there has ever bern more spent for less result in the history of mankind outside of failed war efforts.

The result of all of this is that future generations have gotten stuck with paying off an enormous amount of debt with little to help them pay the bill.

This is also debt, unlike student loans, that Joe Biden and the Democrats cannot just cancel.

In fact, every student debt that is cancelled just makes the U.S. debt even larger.

I doubt that $30 trillion is going to look like a bargain in a few years.

The next generation is going to face some unique challenges and difficult choices because of this debt.

You can take that to the bank.