OPINION: Everyone will pay for federal debt because everyone benefitted
Published 1:30 am Tuesday, September 1, 2026
Compared to federal spending, the average American is downright frugal.
The federal debt is now at $40 trillion, doubled from 10 years ago. If you add up all the credit card debt, car and truck loans and home mortgages held by Americans, excluding commercial properties, you don’t even get to half of the $40 trillion the federal government owes lenders.
It’s hard to think of Americans as thrifty when the average credit card debt is about $6,600 — but compared to the president and Congress, most anyone can look like a responsible spender.
That $40 trillion, divided by 350 million Americans, comes to about $114,000 per person. Just be happy it doesn’t show up on your personal credit score.
And while people must at least fill out a loan form or credit card application to run up debt, all Congress has to do is take a late-night vote on a budget bill and issue congratulatory press releases about congressional hand-outs to their political supporters. The U.S. Treasury sells bonds to cover the bills and no elected official ever has to co-sign for the debt or worry about their personal financial health.
But don’t go blaming the run-up in the nation’s debt on overspending by Democrats. The doubling of the borrowed money to $40 trillion in the past 10 years came under four years of President Joe Biden and six years of President Donald Trump. Running up the bills is an equal opportunity irresponsibility. It’s like they both took the American people to dinner, then walked out before dessert and left the public with the tab.
The interest on all that federal debt is growing at a crushingly fast pace. The U.S. now spends more than $1 trillion a year paying interest on the national debt — that’s more than it spends on Medicare for almost 70 million Americans. In 2010, the interest payment was less than $200 million.
Defaulting on the debt is not an option. Transferring the balance to a new, low-interest credit card for the airline mileage would bankrupt every air carrier in the country. Refinancing the White House to pull out equity, much like a homeowner does for a new deck, will not work so well after Trump demolished the building’s East Wing.
The logical answer is to cut spending and raise revenues. Which means the public helps pay the debt — no one else is going to do it. Besides, the spending supposedly was to benefit the public. Just as people pay off their credit card bills, so too they should pay off the bills government ran up on their behalf.
Take federal spending programs and grants, which Americans, particularly Alaskans, take willingly. That “free money” has a cost and is part of the $40 trillion debt.
In fiscal year 2025, federal money covered three times as much of the state budget as all of the oil and gas revenue collected from taxes and royalties. Add up military spending, Social Security, Medicare, community grants, economic development grants, harbor grants, airport grants, school grants and all the other grant programs, and Alaskans receive more than twice as much in federal dollars than we pay in taxes.
Eventually, someday, maybe Congress and a better president will deal with the debt. At that time, Alaskans will have to help, same as everyone else who enjoyed all the federal spending.
Larry Persily is a longtime Alaska journalist, with breaks for federal, state and municipal public policy work in Alaska and Washington, D.C. He lives in Anchorage and is publisher of the Wrangell Sentinel weekly newspaper.
