Remember When $1 Trillion Was a Big Deal?

I seem to remember seeing a magazine cover — Time? Newsweek? Something else? — that said “A Trillion.”

It must have been around October 1981, research tells me. That was when the United States’ national debt hit that figure.

Some 45 years later, we’ve multiplied that number by 40: The national debt is in the news again right now, because we have hit a new milestone just this week: 40 trillion.

Do you know what else happened 45 years later? The first person achieved trillionaire status, briefly. That’s not entirely unrelated, either: Over those same decades, national policies helped deepen economic inequality and funnel an ever-larger share of the wealth produced by working people up, up and away.

Much of the wealth produced by those workers could have supported them and helped fund the country. Instead, it ended up in the pockets of the ultra-wealthy.

I couldn’t find the news magazine cover I had in mind, and I can’t even be sure I’m remembering that right. I would have been about 15 years old. I was thinking more about boys than the national debt at that point.

Just a few years later, I would cast my first presidential vote for Ronald Reagan. I picked him, quite stupidly and ironically, because he claimed he was going to address the national debt.

Oh, he addressed it, all right. He deserves a large share of the blame for where we are now. His supply-side policies were sold as a way to make the whole country richer. But the money did not trickle down.

It went up.

USA! USA! USA! We’re No. 1!

In absolute terms, no other country has more national debt than the U.S.

USA! USA! USA!

I’ve written plenty about this over the years, and so have countless actual economists, so I won’t bother detailing all the wrong-headed schemes that, if anything, seem to have been designed to pile up debt as quickly as possible.

I do have to note the irony that two presidents who screamed loudest about cutting government spending (Reagan and the current one) both presided over enormous increases in the national debt. Debt ballooned under both of them. The current one still has half his second term to go, and he is unpredictable, so we’ll have to see if his borrowing binge continues.

Instead of paying for the government we want through taxes, we keep cutting taxes on our wealthiest citizens. Here, you can review our highest marginal income tax rates by year for yourself.

To pay for all the programs and wars we decided we wanted, we just borrowed. Astonishingly, borrowing the money instead of taxing the rich has made some of the very wealthiest Americans unimaginably rich and has put the country in debt, a situation nobody could have predicted.

Unless they had the IQ of a goldfish.

We used to say this meant we were borrowing from our grandchildren, but I think we can stop saying that. I think we are borrowing from our great-grandchildren, if not our great-great-grandchildren.

Our largest generation, the Boomers, enjoyed all sorts of advantages while paying far lower income tax rates during their working years than their parents had paid. Boomers began entering the workforce around 1964-1982, just in time to enjoy those lower income tax rates of the 1980s.

Even nicer, many of them still had unions and got pensions. It must be said that not every Boomer has had it easy. It is, famously, a large generation and some have done better than others. But as a group, they’re envy-worthy because they benefited from an unusually favorable combination of economic circumstances. They were born at a lucky point in the timeline.

Now, future generations — in what we suspect will be ever-shrinking numbers — will inherit the bill. I don’t know what kind of careers will be available for my grandchildren, and I can’t even speculate what the world is going to be like for their children, if they can even afford to have any.

“Sorry, future child born in 2050. Here is a bill your great-great-grandparents ran up. We decided not to charge them for the costs of running the country and to make you pay for everything instead. Pity AI ate all the jobs.”

Thom Hartmann, The Hartmann Report

Inequality has never, ever before been this bad in America, going all the way back to the 1700s. So, no surprise, Democrats who offer real solutions are winning primaries across the country and are poised to make huge electoral gains this fall, unless Trump and his shock troops succeed in pulling off the coup they’re clearly trying to make happen.

Paul Waldman, The Cross Section

The fact that the deficit is now nearly as high on a monthly basis as it was in the heart of the covid pandemic is simply stunning.

Dana F. Blankenhorn, Facing the Future

Whether it’s Mark Zuckerberg’s yacht ignoring calls for assistance, or Sergey Brin spending $100 million to kill a wealth tax, each morning brings a new example of some oligarch pretending laws and norms don’t, and shouldn’t, apply to them.

Bianka @ Waronomics

European states have centuries of experience with what happens when the gap between classes gets too wide: civil unrest, revolutions, societal collapse. Which is why they built shock absorbers, so nowadays - no matter how poor you are in Europe, you will never be as poor as the poorest in the rest of the world, the United States included (I know, controversial take!). Meaning, you are far less likely to end up homeless, be denied access to basic healthcare or find yourself unable to meet your very basic needs.

I write about money, economic inequality and the systems that shape ordinary people’s lives.

If you like my work, subscribe to me here and on Medium. My most recent novel is The Trailer Park Rules.

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All wealthy families are alike; each poor family is poor in its own way.
— Leo Tolstoy, if he had written about a trailer park

For residents of the Loire Mobile Home Park, surviving means understanding which rules to follow and which to break. Each has landed in the trailer park for wildly different reasons.

Jonesy is a failed journalist with one dream left. Angel is the kind of irresponsible single mother society just shakes its head about, and her daughter Maya is the kid everybody overlooks. Jimmy and Janiece Jackson wanted to be the first in their families to achieve the American dream, but all the positive attitude in the world can’t solve their predicament. Darren is a disabled man trying to enjoy his life despite a dark past. Kaitlin is a former stripper with a sugar daddy, while Shirley is an older lady who has come down in the world and lives in denial. Nancy runs the park like a tyrant but finds out when a larger corporation takes over that she’s not different from the residents.

When the new owners jack up the lot rent, the lives of everyone in the park shift dramatically and in some cases tragically.

Welcome to the Loire Mobile Home Park! Please observe all rules.

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