I had only a ballpark idea of the
national debt
before this week. Like most people, I knew it was in the tens of trillions, which meant that it was already far beyond my practical computational powers. Without a tangible sense of scale, the mind simply drifts.
This week, the
Treasury Department
announced that America’s national debt crossed $34 trillion for the first time. This is a dark harbinger of things to come.
HOUSE REPUBLICANS FIND BORDER CRISIS ‘STOPPED’ IN EAGLE PASS AFTER CARTELS HALT OPERATIONS
The country is regularly warned about the potential consequences of the national debt. It can wreck our economy through diminished investment, high interest rates, and persistently high inflation. It can increase international tensions, particularly when lenders are hostile foreign powers (
China
now owns roughly $1 trillion of our debt). It can threaten the social safety net, which is relied upon by the poorest in our society. Top line: the higher the debt, the greater the likelihood of long-term suffering.
But the sheer scale of the new national debt record renders the public incapable of responding with appropriate urgency. We’ve become numb to such numbers, and we have no clear sense of what they mean. The ordinary taxpayer sees no practical difference between $34 trillion, $40 trillion, or even $50 trillion, which is a threshold we are projected to pass by the end of the decade. If previous “records” didn’t alert America to the gravity of the problem, there’s no reason to think future ones will.
Sadly, the debt isn’t the only number of national significance that may as well be gibberish.
It was reported this week that U.S. border officials are on track to process over 300,000 illegal immigrants during the month of December. That would be another record. As with the debt, the number of illegal immigrants crossing our border each month (not to mention the tens of thousands who cross undetected) is so astronomical that it scrambles the nation’s collective capacity to comprehend it. A total of 300,000 border crossings per month is not appreciably different from 200,000 or 100,000 to the average person.
We see pictures of huddled masses, tired and hungry from their journey, and our hearts rend. But the camera is never zoomed out far enough to capture the immensity of the crisis. The amount of immigrants who entered the United States illegally in December would fill up Yankees Stadium six times. And those are only the ones we know about! Here’s another immigration statistic: The number of immigrants who entered America illegally in 2023 surpassed our national birth rate.
The implications of the border crisis on national security have a similar effect on the mind as a too-large number. Who wants to even think about how many of those immigrants crossed with the intent to make America suffer over its support of Israel? Or with designs to smuggle China-made fentanyl into our communities? Amid a sea of desperate families swim an unknown number of bad hombres, indeed — it is a statistical certainty. I will admit to being foolish enough to have considered that phrase racist when uttered by former President Donald Trump in 2015. But it is and was manifestly true.
Both of these dubious new records, for which both major political parties share blame, speak to a nation that can no longer be bothered to fight for its own survival. That’s another way of saying we are a nation in decline. If America is ever to be restored, she must look these ludicrous numbers in the face and fight the temptation to look away.
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Peter Laffin is a contributor at the Washington Examiner. His work has also appeared in RealClearPolitics, the Catholic Thing, and the National Catholic Register.
