The $40 trillion national debt in perspective

154 days.

That’s how long it took the Trump administration to add another $1 trillion to the national debt.

As of August 18, the national debt stood at $40,047,425,768,420.22.

Let’s try to put the debt into some perspective.

Over the last 22 weeks, the federal government has added roughly $6.5 billion in new debt every single day.

If the U.S. government folded the debt into a single 30-year bond at 5 percent, Uncle Sam would need to accumulate roughly $9.13 billion per day to pay off the bond at term.

According to the National Debt Clock, every U.S. citizen would need to write a check for $116,487 to pay off the debt.

Of course, many Americans don’t pay any federal income taxes. If only taxpayers foot the bill, they would each need to fork out $360,794. 

The debt-to-GDP ratio stands at 122.71 percent.

At $30 trillion, the national debt is bigger than the combined annual GDP of China, Germany, India, Japan, and the UK.

The pace of debt accumulation over the last several years is truly astounding. 

When President Trump took office in 2020, the debt stood at $36.2 trillion. In other words, the President has added around $3.8 trillion to the debt so far during his second term.

When Biden took up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the national debt stood at just under $27.8 trillion. Biden’s share of the debt totaled around $8.4 trillion. That’s just a little less than the $7.8 trillion piled on by Trump 1.0.

Since the beginning of Trump’s first term, Team Trump-Biden has roughly doubled the national debt!

Compare that to the former champion of overspending – President Barack Obama. He was pilloried as a big spender because he was the first president to generate $1 trillion deficits. He managed this feat three times during the Great Recession.

We can get a sense of the accelerating debt accumulation by looking at how many days it took to add another $1 trillion.

The national debt hit $34 trillion in January 2024. Ten months later, it eclipsed $35 trillion in November 2024.

From there, 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 bumped up against the debt ceiling on January 1, 2025. 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. Barely two months later, we were at $38 trillion. Uncle Sam increased the debt by another trillion in 150 days, and here we are today, at $40 trillion, just 154 days later.

All this debt is expensive.

July interest payments pushed total interest expense to $1.17 trillion through the first 10 months of fiscal 2026. That was up 15.5 percent compared to the same period in fiscal ’25.

Interest on the national debt cost $1.2 trillion in fiscal 2025. That was up 7.3 percent over 2024.

If you wonder why I think the Fed won’t be able to hold interest rates higher for longer – this is the reason.

It’s also almost certainly the reason the Treasury Department decided to put its big fat thumb on the bond market with increased buybacks.

When you boil it all down, the federal government is functionally insolvent. Money printing is the only thing keeping the ship afloat.

Earlier this year, Forbes argued, “The reckoning, long deferred, is becoming impossible to ignore.”

And yet the mainstream continues to ignore it. As already noted, the Treasury released the data to the sound of crickets.

When we hit these milestones, a few people sit up and take notice, but most people shrug. They just continue as if everything were fine.

Ladies and gentlemen, everything is not fine.