What is the National Debt?

Civics 101

NHPR

History, Government, Society & Culture

4.2 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 2 August 2022

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Since our nation's founding, the federal government has borrowed money from other governments, private investors, and businesses in order to operate. Over the last century, the debt ceiling, a Congressional cap on how much debt we can have, keeps getting higher and higher. We talk about how the national debt works, how it's been used as political leverage, and how that impacts the health of our economy. Louise Sheiner, senior economics fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Michael Dorf, Constitutional law professor at Cornell Law, help us make sense of trillions of dollars in debt. CLICK HERE: Visit our website to see all of our episodes, donate to the podcast, sign up for our newsletter, get free educational materials, and more! To see Civics 101 in book form, check out A User's Guide to Democracy: How America Works by Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice, featuring illustrations by Tom Toro. Check out our other weekly NHPR podcast, Outside/In - we think you'll love it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Nick, I'm going to put you on the spot.
0:03.0	All right.
0:04.0	Okay.
0:05.0	Do you think that you can guess our national debt to the nearest trillion dollar amount?
0:11.2	When I was a child, I remember being seven trillion dollars.
0:15.5	Okay.
0:16.5	It's around thirty now.
0:18.8	Wow.
0:19.8	I mean, can you even gather with thirty trillion dollars?
0:22.9	Looks like it's comically large.
0:28.3	One of my father's favorite exercises was this.
0:30.6	Do you know the thing about the difference between a million seconds and a billion seconds
0:33.2	and a trillion seconds?
0:34.2	Is it a trick question?
0:35.2	No, no, no.
0:36.2	A million seconds was last week.
0:38.1	It was 11 days ago.
0:39.4	Oh, yeah.
0:40.4	A billion seconds is when you were born in Hannah 31 years ago as a billion seconds.
0:45.7	A trillion seconds is over 31,000 years ago.
0:50.4	Exponence, man.
0:52.1	Thirty trillion is a huge number, right?
	...

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