The national debt is more than $36 trillion, which is about $110,000 for every man, woman, and other-gendered person in the United States. When I was in high school, the national debt was about $1,800 per person, and I remember wondering if I could afford to pay my share. At that time, it might have been possible to pay it off with a one-time tax on everyone; today, not so much.
Before World War II, the U.S. had a long history of going into debt during wartime and then paying off most of that debt between wars. The above chart shows that after 1945 we paid off some of the war-related debt, but then entered a 1984-like world of permanent hot or cold war, which led Congress to give up any notion of completely paying off the debt. Still, as shown in the chart below, after adjusting for inflation the debt per capita continued to decline until around 1974. Continue reading
