By Steve Brawner
© 2025 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.
The national debt reached a new milestone last month. Did anybody notice?
Maybe a party would help.
Sam Sicard, president and CEO of First National Bank of Fort Smith, offered that suggestion in a text message Tuesday.
The day before, the national debt had reached $37 trillion.
Sicard, who has tried to call attention to the issue for years, texted, “Let’s plan a ‘Hit $40 trillion’ party for next year.”
He was being sarcastic about planning a party, but not about the concept.
“Bottom line is we need to find ways to grab voters’ attention, and parody of the recklessness is another approach,” he wrote.
It’s obvious that throwing numbers at voters isn’t working.
Still, let’s do it one more time, just for fun. The national debt reached $37 trillion Monday. By Tuesday it was $70 billion more than that. The actual figure that day was $37,070,422,809,316.32. That number is equal to more than $108,000 for very American man, woman and child.
Taxpayers will pay $1 trillion this year just to cover the interest. That’s equal to almost $3,000 for each American. Interest payments are now the second largest item in the federal budget behind Social Security. Taxpayers pay more in interest on the debt than they do for defense or Medicare.
With numbers like that, one would think that elected officials might try to address the issue. Instead, earlier this summer President Trump and Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates its tax and spending provisions will add $19 trillion to the debt over 30 years and $32 trillion if its provisions become permanent. All six members of Arkansas’ congressional delegation voted for OBBBA.
If the debt had suddenly risen to $37 trillion, perhaps elected officials would act. The United States sometimes responds quickly to shocking events, like the Pearl Harbor and Sept. 11 attacks. When a problem only gets worse over time, it’s easy to ignore it or even to take steps that actively make it worse. The latter is what happened with OBBBA.
That’s human nature. Sometimes it takes a health scare to make us eat better and exercise.
The thing is, we’re in the middle of the heart attack now.
The national debt stood at $4 trillion in 1992 when third party presidential candidate Ross Perot ran on the issue and won 19% of the vote. It was $5.8 trillion on Sept. 30, 2001. And then over the next quarter century, it skyrocketed as the nation has faced a few costly crises and as presidents and Congresses have cut taxes and increased spending even when the country wasn’t in a crisis.
The past few years, it’s expanded like a balloon being pumped full of helium. It reached $30 trillion in early 2022 and $35 trillion last year. At this rate, Sicard’s suggestion that it could reach $40 trillion next year is not unrealistic. In fact, it’s probably likely. It took from 1790 until 2008 to reach $10 trillion. We’re now on pace to quadruple that amount in less than two decades.
Will $40 trillion be big enough for anyone to notice? Nothing previously has been for a long time. Scary numbers, moralizing, and dire warnings of impending catastrophe haven’t worked even a little bit. Elected officials just keep passing tax cuts and spending increases, knowing that’s pretty much what many voters want.
That’s why it might be time for the different approach Sicard suggested. This is, after all, the 2020s. President Trump didn’t get elected president by spouting a bunch of numbers. He made it to the White House because he’s a genius at calling attention to himself and his issues. Balancing the budget hasn’t been one of them so far.
It doesn’t seem to have been anybody’s.
Anybody up for a “Hit $40 trillion party”? It may or may not call attention to the debt better than spouting numbers has done.
But it would definitely be more fun.