In the Blink of an Eye the National Debt Exceeds $38 Trillion

(Mike Maharrey, Money Metals News Service) Well, that was quick. Seventy-one days to be exact.

That’s how long it took for the federal government to add another trillion dollars to the national debt.

In August, the debt eclipsed $37 trillion for the first time. On Oct. 21, it blew passed $38 trillion.

As of that date, the U.S. government owed $38,019,813,354,700.26.

This happened despite record tariff revenue and the media relations program known as DOGE.

And the debt is snowballing at an accelerating pace.

In 2020, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that the debt wouldn’t hit $37 trillion until 2030.

Oops.

Putting the growth in context, the national debt hit $34 trillion in January 2024 and $35 trillion in November 2024.

It took 188 days for the debt to grow from $35 trillion to $36 trillion. It took another 265 days to reach $37 trillion. But don’t be fooled. The borrowing didn’t slow down between $36 and $37 trillion. It was just that the federal government ran up against the debt ceiling on January 1. As a result, it couldn’t borrow any money until the enactment of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” which raised the debt ceiling by $5 trillion as of July 1.

At that time, the national debt stood at $36.2 trillion. It took less than two months for the federal government to borrow more than $800 billion, pushing the debt over $37 trillion.

And here, barely two months later, at $38 trillion.

It won’t be long before we’re talking about a $39 trillion national debt.

I’ve heard people discussing eliminating the income tax and filling the hole with tariff revenue. This is absurd. Tariff receipts grew by 142 percent in fiscal 2025. That wasn’t even enough to fill the deficit hole. Despite a 6.4 percent increase in federal revenue in fiscal ’25 and an 11 percent increase in the previous year, the U.S. government still ran the fourth-largest budget deficit in history.

The problem is on the spending side of the ledger. The U.S. government spent over $7 trillion in fiscal 2025, a 4.1 percent increase over the prior year.

Call me cynical, but I would bet dollars to donuts that the spending isn’t going to decrease in fiscal 2026.

The National Debt in Perspective

It’s hard to fathom $38 trillion. What does that even mean?

Here’s some perspective.

Every U.S. citizen would have to write a $110,641 check to pay off the debt.

Of course, a lot of people don’t pay taxes. That means the taxpayer burden is much higher. Every U.S. taxpayer would have to write a check for $327,507 to wipe out the debt.  And that’s on top of the taxes we already pay!

Looking at it another way, $38 trillion is more than the annual GDP of China, Germany, India, Japan, and the UK combined.

It’s hard to wrap your head around how big 1 trillion is, much less 38 trillion. Here are a few factoids to help you visualize just how big that number is:

• There are 1 million seconds in 11.5 days. A trillion seconds is about 32,000 years.
• If you could say one number every second, it would take about 11.5 million days to count to 1 trillion.
• If you had spent $1 million every day since the birth of Christ, you still wouldn’t have spent $1 trillion.
• If you line up dollar bills end-to-end, you could go to the moon and back around 203 times with $1 trillion. You could wrap them around the Earth about 3,893 times.
• If you stacked up 1 trillion-dollar bills, the dollar tower would rise to 67,866 miles.
• If a cup of coffee costs $3, you could buy 333 billion cups of coffee with $1 trillion.
• If you had 1 trillion dollars, you could give every person on Earth approximately $125.
• One trillion grains of rice would weigh about 20,000 metric tons.

Keep in mind that all these examples illustrate the size of $1 trillion. The national debt is 38 times that number.

Does the National Debt Really Matter?

A lot of people are under the illusion that the debt doesn’t matter. Whenever I talk about it, people’s eyes glaze over, and they just shrug.

James Madison disagreed. He called public debt “a public curse, and in a Rep. Govt. a greater than in any other.

Thomas Jefferson also disagreed. He called public debt “the greatest of dangers to be feared.”

So did George Washington.

“No pecuniary consideration is more urgent than the regular redemption and discharge of the public debt. On none can delay be more injurious or an economy of time more valuable.”

According to the national debt clock, the current debt level represents 120.6 percent of the GDP. Studies have shown that a debt-to-GDP ratio of over 90 percent retards economic growth by about 30 percent.

And then there’s the growing interest expense. Interest on the national debt cost $1.2 trillion in fiscal 2024. That was up 7.3 percent over 2024.

In the last fiscal year, the federal government spent more on interest on the debt than it did on national defense ($917 billion) or Medicare ($997 billion). The only higher spending category is Social Security ($1.58 trillion).

Even more concerning is the fact that at some point, the world will decide it’s no longer interested in financing the U.S. government’s borrowing and spending.

As the Bipartisan Policy Center points out, the growing national debt and the mounting fiscal irresponsibility undermine the dollar.

“Confidence in U.S. creditworthiness may be undermined by a rapidly deteriorating fiscal situation, an increasing concern with federal debt set to grow substantially in the coming years.”

If you’re wondering why the Federal Reserve is talking about easing monetary policy despite persistently high inflation, look no further than the debt. The government needs the central bank to keep its thumb on the bond market. That requires it to hold more Treasuries on its balance sheet, thereby creating demand for bonds. This allows the federal government to borrow at a lower interest rate than it otherwise would. This is exactly why Fed Chair Jerome Powell recently said balance sheet reduction will end soon.

Given the budget deficit and the pace of debt accumulation, it may not be long before the Fed returns to quantitative easing (QE).

And that means even more inflation.

People seem unconcerned about the growing debt because people have warned about it for decades, and the promised crisis hasn’t occurred – yet.

But the bottom line is that just because the debt hasn’t caused a crisis doesn’t mean it won’t. After all, things happen slowly and then all at once.

Mike Maharrey is a journalist and market analyst for Money Metals with over a decade of experience in precious metals. He holds a BS in accounting from the University of Kentucky and a BA in journalism from the University of South Florida.