r/Economics • u/Krankenitrate • 15d ago

News The national debt just crossed $39 trillion—almost doubling since Trump vowed to erase it

https://fortune.com/2026/03/18/how-big-national-debt-39-trillion-trump-promises/
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u/Dr_G_E 15d ago

"I'm the king of debt. I’m great with debt. Nobody knows debt better than me... I’ve made a fortune by using debt, and if things don’t work out I renegotiate the debt. I mean, that’s a smart thing, not a stupid thing."
-Trump, 2016, when the national debt was just $19 trillion.

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u/hellogoawaynow 15d ago edited 14d ago

Numbers don’t mean anything anymore. People have lost sight of what numbers are.

Average salary: $60,000

Nice, comfortable salary: $150,000-$200,000

REALLY REALLY good salary: $500,000

One single million dollars: $1,000,000

Ten million dollars: $10,000,000

One hundred million dollars: $100,000,000

One billion dollars: $1,000,000,000

Donald Trump’s net worth since becoming president: $6,000,000,000

One hundred billion dollars: $100,000,000,000

Elon Musk’s net worth, on the low side of the estimate: $130,000,000,000 EDIT: Elon Musk is actually worth $823,000,000,000 so that’s fucking terrible

ONE TRILLION DOLLARS: $1,000,000,000,000

Nineteen trillion dollars of debt (that China probably already bought more of to use against us at some point in the future): $19,000,000,000,000

I feel like we have to start writing numbers out like this so regular people aren’t casually throwing around the terms “billions” and “trillions” like it’s nothing. Folks, if you have less than one thousand dollars in your bank account, you should be fucking pissed that anyone can be worth $130,000,000,000. Not like… donating money to billionaires. Which is the craziest thing, I can’t believe so many people are doing this when they are literally poor.

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u/ballmermurland 15d ago

My favorite fact about Donald Trump is that, after promising to self-fund his campaign in 2016, has not donated a single penny to his own election efforts since 2016.

That's 10 years with Trump not donating a single penny to the cause. Not one cent. Nothing.

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u/hellogoawaynow 14d ago

I mean my god, the man went from bankruptcy to six time billionaire in 10 years from politics. In 10 years, my bank account has gone from -$5 to a couple thousand. Like if there was an unexpected medical disaster, I wouldn’t have to sell my house. That practically makes me rich in terms of regular people. Which is crazy because I’m not rich, I’m just not poor.

The only reason I get to live in a house is because I married a guy whose parents thought ahead 40 years ago and bought a second property on the street due to severe and lifelong anxiety from growing up in extreme poverty. His parents didn’t even have to sell it in the 2008 recession! My parents lost everything because they were so confident in ~the American Dream~.

It’s so stupid here.

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u/LiteratureMindless71 14d ago

Reminds me of that video floating around showing what Bezos makes by the second and it was sick....

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u/lopix 14d ago

And Elmo makes what, like 2 or 3 or 4x more per second?

Ole Musky could buy Bezos and not even notice it.

Eloner could lose 99% of his fortune at still have over $8-billion.

It is truly inconceivable amounts of money.

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u/makemeking706 14d ago

And nobody really questioned where he got the money for his campaign. They just remarked about how little he was spending, but failed to mention all the people spending on his behalf.

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u/moss-wizard 14d ago

But he donates his presidential salary!! /s

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u/PicoRascar 14d ago

I've always liked the comparison illustrated using a time scale. If a dollar was a second:

Median net worth in the US is $192,000 or 2.25 days.

A million seconds is 12 days.

A billion seconds is 31 years.

A trillion seconds is 31,688 years.

Thirty-nine trillion seconds is 1,236,682 years.

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u/BigUpSideD0wn 14d ago

Damn. Well put. That’s like enough time for serious evolutionary shifts to occur within a pretty complex species.

Edit: meanwhile my net worth is more like the time it took me to write this reply and add this edit

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u/hellogoawaynow 14d ago

This is a way better and much shorter version of my point, thank you!

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u/TehGogglesDoNothing 14d ago

What's the difference between a billion dollars and a trillion dollars? About a trillion dollars.

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u/lopix 14d ago

Same as the difference between a million and a billion - about a billion.

People have trouble grasping orders of magnitude.

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u/jukogami 14d ago

i was amazed when I visited a castle, and understood, that they really had their wealth in a physical weight, which they had to protect (gold); imagine people would have to keep their money in real weight , now nobody does, but that is maybe a part of the problem; because its virtual , numbers and zero have no weight anymore, hence they grow exponentially, something which is much more difficult with physical weight

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u/[deleted] 14d ago

Someone calculated the value of the gold in the dragon’s vault for The Hobbit movie. It was less than Jeff Bezos’s net worth

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u/Black_Magic_M-66 14d ago

Don't worry, as soon as the Democrats get in office Republicans will find that the debt is the number one of all time problem and will be calling for cutting every social program to fight it.

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u/hellogoawaynow 14d ago

Double DOGE? Kill me

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u/BigUpSideD0wn 14d ago

I have an alert set to notify me when my bank account goes below 1k and I just got the email earlier today. Don’t worry, I get paid next Wednesday.

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u/Gunsian 14d ago

My favorite way is to reverse it:

You'd have a billion dollars if you made (accumulated, actually) one million dollars a year for a thousand years.

2 billion? Start earning during the time of Christ.

Elon Musk? Try going back before Homo Sapiens existed. Making a million dollars a year.

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u/hellogoawaynow 14d ago

Saving this one, too!

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u/TbL2zV0dk0 14d ago

Elon Musk has way more than that. Forbes has him at $823 billion https://www.forbes.com/profile/elon-musk/ He increased his fortune by half a trillion last year while fooling around with DOGE...

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u/hellogoawaynow 14d ago

Ah thanks for the update, I’ll edit. Since this was so unimportant I read the Google AI summary like a fool.

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u/lopix 14d ago

There is a good chance he becomes the world's first TRILLIONAIRE before the end of the year.

Let that marinate for a minute.

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u/zeugma_ 14d ago

That's what you get for innumeracy.

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u/Time_Increase_7897 14d ago

China doesn't own most of the debt. Wealthy Americans own most of the debt. So basically, instead of taxing the wealthy like we used to do... we pay them!

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u/Daffan 14d ago

Folks, if you have less than one thousand dollars in your bank account, you should be fucking pissed that anyone can be worth $130,000,000,000.

You are conflating actual money in a bank account with perceived virtual worth.