Deeper in debt

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. 

I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

The numbers are getting harder to ignore—America’s national debt has crossed a historic threshold. 

Here’s WORLD commentator Cal Thomas.

CAL THOMAS: This is the moment people have been warning about for years.

AUDIO: For the first time since World War II, our national debt is now larger than, / than the size of the economy… $31.27 trillion…That’s about $114,000 per American…

People of a certain age will recall a lyric from the Tennessee Ernie Ford song Sixteen Tons: “Another day older and deeper in debt.”

That line may have been written about coal miners, but it now describes the United States government.

AUDIO: We’re spending more than we’re taking in in tax revenue. It's exacerbated by pandemic spending, and we also have an aging population which means that we're spending a lot more on Medicare, Social Security…

That’s the polite explanation. 

Here’s the blunt one: Washington has spent money it doesn’t have for decades—and voters have rewarded the people who promise the most and postpone the cost.

We have created a system where the benefits are immediate … and the consequences are delayed.

Until they aren’t.

AUDIO: We are now spending more than $1 trillion on our own debt… that’s higher than the defense budget…

More on interest than on national defense.

That is not just a statistic. It is a warning about priorities—and about trajectory. A nation that finances its past faster than it funds its future is headed for trouble.

AUDIO: You know, it's roughly a family making $70,000 a year, but having a credit card balance of $500,000.

In any household, that ends one way: Eventually, the credit runs out.

What makes this worse is not ignorance. It's avoidance. We know where the money goes. We know the biggest drivers—entitlements, interest, and a political system unwilling to say no.

And we know—because we’ve done it before—that restraint is possible.

In the 1990s, Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich worked together to balance the budget. They cut spending. They made difficult choices. And for a time, it worked.

Today, those choices are postponed … because elections are always closer than consequences.

Here is what cannot be postponed forever: Reducing the debt will mean cutting benefits, raising taxes—or both. There is no third option.

The more we wait, the harder those choices become.

For WORLD, I’m Cal Thomas.

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