Trillions Spent, Nothing Built: America’s Debt and Decline

Something is breaking in America. Moody’s just stripped the U.S. of its last AAA credit rating. Treasury yields are spiking. Wall Street is nervous. The debt crisis isn’t a distant threat anymore—it’s here.

Republicans are using it to push what they always push: cuts. Cuts to Medicaid, cuts to food assistance, more work requirements for people who are already struggling. At the same time, they’re trying to lock in another round of tax breaks for the wealthy. It’s all pain, no upside. The numbers don’t even work. Any cuts deep enough to make a real dent in the deficit would have to come out of programs that millions of people rely on to survive.

Democrats are resisting some of the worst of it, but they’re still caught in the same framework. Trimming around the edges, trying to sound responsible while the system crumbles.

The problem isn’t just the size of the debt. It’s what we spent it on—and what we didn’t.

Since 1975, the federal government has spent nearly $100 trillion. Here’s where most of it went:

• Social Security: $23.6 trillion

• National Defense: $21.2 trillion

• Medicare and Medicaid: $25.3 trillion

• Non-defense discretionary spending: $17.5 trillion

• Interest on the debt: $9.1 trillion

Almost 40 percent of all federal spending over the last five decades went to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Another 17 percent went to the military. These are the pillars of the modern federal budget. But they weren’t investments in the future. They were mostly stopgaps—ways to patch up an economy that was becoming more unequal and less productive with every passing year.

Even with all that spending, Social Security still leaves millions of seniors in poverty. Medicare and Medicaid still operate in a healthcare system that delivers some of the worst outcomes in the developed world. We’re spending trillions and people are still falling further behind. Not because we spent too much—but because we didn’t fix the core problems.

We didn’t build a modern energy grid. We didn’t build high-speed rail. We didn’t build affordable housing at scale. We didn’t build a public childcare system. We didn’t build a healthcare system that works. We didn’t rebuild our industrial base. Instead, we handed out tax breaks, bailed out banks, propped up asset prices, and watched the richest people in the country walk off with the gains.

And we paid for it the same way working families did—with debt.

In 1950, total household debt in America was the equivalent of about eight weeks of national labor. Today it’s over sixty-three weeks. That’s a 670 percent increase. People weren’t given raises—they were told to borrow. They weren’t offered healthcare—they were offered medical debt. They weren’t given stable housing—they were given high-interest loans.

Meanwhile, RAND estimates that nearly $79 trillion was taken from the bottom 90 percent of earners since 1975 and shifted to the top one percent. That money wasn’t lost. It was extracted.

Now the people it was taken from are being told they have to suffer more—so the people who took it can have lower taxes.

You can feel it breaking. Wall Street is circling. SPACs are back. Crypto hype is rising again. Trump’s people are trying to lock in a new era of financial nonsense while gutting public programs and deregulating everything in sight.

So what do we do? We build. Not metaphorically. Not symbolically. Literally. Build.

There’s no path out of this that doesn’t involve rebuilding the foundations of the American economy. Infrastructure, industry, public services. Affordable housing, universal healthcare, reliable energy, resilient supply chains. Not just money changing hands. Physical systems that lower costs and deliver value.

We’re on track to spend $75 trillion on healthcare over the next ten years. I wrote about that here. Medicare for All is a start—but it’s not enough. We need more doctors, more hospitals, more medication produced at cost. We need a system that’s built to deliver care, not extract profit.

The same goes for housing. When private developers can’t or won’t build what people need, the government should do it. The same goes for energy, broadband, transportation, education, childcare. If the market fails, we step in—not with subsidies and incentives, but with actual public alternatives. Build the thing. Let people use it.

We’ve done this before. We built the interstate highway system. We brought electricity to rural America. We built NASA and the internet. Other countries still do this. We act like we’re helpless. We’re not.

This isn’t a budget crisis. It’s a capacity crisis. And the only way out is to rebuild it all. This is a crisis of imagination. And the answer isn’t austerity. It’s action. It’s building. It’s work. Let’s get to it.

I know it easy to say. But what do we actually do? Where do we start?

I laid out a roadmap here:

The 2028 Election Starts Now