By Mark A. Minnella for TOWNHALL
Credit has become our friend. You know, like the friendly neighborhood drug dealer. Always there to seduce you with a nice, warm, addictive product. Swipe the card. Finance the car. Buy the house. Borrow for college. Put Christmas on plastic. Enjoy it now and don’t worry about the consequences… till later. Washington does the same thing, only with trillions of dollars from generations of Americans who have not even been born yet.
We sacrifice tomorrow to have what we want today. We borrow from our children, our grandchildren, people who will never have a voice in the decisions being made at their expense. Then we point to everything that borrowed money purchased and call it prosperity. It is not prosperity. It is consumption financed by somebody else’s future.
The United States now carries roughly $40 trillion in federal debt. That is more than $116,000 per man, woman, and child in the country if it were divided evenly. That is not literally a bill being mailed to every American, but it illustrates the staggering scale of what we have accumulated. And we are still borrowing.
From October 2025 through July 2026, the first 10 months of the federal fiscal year, Washington ran another $1.8 trillion deficit. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) now estimates that the full-year deficit could reach roughly $2.1 trillion. This is not an emergency war budget or a temporary response to another Great Depression. It has become the normal operation of our government.
