US national debt surges past $39 Trillion

The Democratic party would do well if they rebranded as socially progressive and fiscally conservative.

Government debt gets resolved eventually through inflation. There's never a point where we have to "pay it all back" and get the debt down to zero. We just end up paying of a $1 loan with a dollar that's worth only 50c.

So there's never a particular point that it "comes back to bite us" - if anything, the "bite" is happening already right now for all of us. Inflation is a form of taxation on currency. It's less like credit card debt and more like wage garnishing.

It's also worth pointing out that young people are less affected by inflation than old - retirees and people with savings. Inflation is good for people in debt. So it's not so much your children you have to worry about with today's debt level so much as it is yourself.

As GDP percentage, only two countries are higher: Italy and Greece (edit: and Japan).

Public debt is a significant political talking point in both cases (and even in Germany, with a much lower debt percentage).

The current US administration (and the last republicans in general) did an excellent job in pretending to be the ones fighting public debt when they are actually exacerbating it; I'm curious if there is gonna be a reckoning at some point.

So at what point does us bond ratings go down and cost of borrowing becomes problematic?

I know us is buyoed by the petrodollar, but surely that only goes so far.

> The Government Accountability Office outlines some of the impact of rising government debt on Americans

Well, we found another agency that won't last much longer in this administration...

Compounding working the way it always does. This won’t stop until it breaks.

For some context: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S

That chart doesn't include WWII, which might be the only time that comes close.

Apparently the debt is keeping the Fed from raising interest rates as much as they did in 1979 when a similar crisis happened. Raising interest rates would increase the debt servicing costs pushing the US into a debt crisis.

This is a good time to share this article again:

Isn’t it Time to Stop Calling it “The National Debt”? - https://evonomics.com/isnt-time-stop-calling-national-debt/

I'm sort of surprised to see this on the HN front page. Typically the US national debt is only a mainstream topic of discourse when there isn't a Republican in office.

Trump has added $4T to the debt in one year:

From https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/debt-to-the-penny/d...

3/19/2025 $36,214,467,819,348.16. --> 3/17/2026 $39,016,762,910,245.14

Yet strangely all Republicans are silent

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47434138

What's $200 billion more gonna hurt :')

Economists often say that the national debt isn't analogous to consumer debt, because the US has a number of means to address it that the average consumer does not have, including the ability to print money.

And while that's true ... perhaps we as citizens and taxpayers would be better off ignoring that technicality and treating this debt as more like consumer debt.

Eventually, it's going to come back to bite us or our children, and we need to be willing to make some hard choices now to avoid having to make even harder choices later.

How that's ole' DOGE horseshit coming along?

Are you feeling those tremendous efficiency gains yet?

Uh oh. Looks like we're gonna have to cut spending on science, regulation, infrastructure and social programs even more.

thats roughly $100 grand per head

It's a good job Elon Musk and his friends sacked all those governement workers, otherwise it would have been $39.0000001 trillion.

…add on another $1T for the student loans that will never be repaid. Those aren’t counted? There’s a shocker. Mr. Market lost his Marker up his ass a long time ago y’all. Plan accordingly.

It's just a number.

Kinda funny how in some 4 year periods these sorts of headlines are treated as existential crises, whereas in other 4 year periods they are not.