Today is the first day of September. It seems like a good time to talk about another first. This is the first time the national debt has reached $40 trillion. The treasury secretary declared, “There’s nothing magic about the $40 trillion number.” That may be true, but it is worth taking a moment to try to understand how large this number has become.

Our friends at Scientific American want to remind us that the number is truly astronomical. For example, 40 trillion is a four with 13 zeros. If you took 40 trillion one dollar bills and laid them end to end, you could go from Earth to the Sun and back 20 times. If you tried to spend one dollar per second, it would take you 1.27 million years. The distance from Earth to Alpha Centauri is 25 trillion miles.

How did we get to $40 trillion in national debt? Those of us who are older saw it happening and were warning about it. But we Americans kept electing politicians who were content with ignoring the growing national debt.

The U.S. didn’t rack up $1 trillion in national debt until October 1981. President Ronald Reagan said, “If we as a nation needed a warning, let that be it.” Think about that. The accumulated national debt from George Washington to Ronald Reagan was $1 trillion. We now add $1 trillion in national debt every 5-6 months. 

The first time the federal budget reached $1 trillion was in 1987. Our current budget is $7.4 trillion. And I think we can agree that we aren’t getting a government that is seven times better than forty years ago. Instead, we have government spending that is out of control and there is no end in sight.