A deficit-happy government may lead to a debt-driven financial crisis

There are milestones you celebrate: a kid’s first step, a round-numbered birthday, a marriage anniversary. And then there are the milestones you dread: Reaching $22 trillion in national debt is one of them. We’re slated to reach that number next month, yet nobody seems to care.

The $22 trillion figure we’ll soon hit is the total of $16 trillion in public debt (what the government owes to domestic and foreign investors) and $5.8 trillion in intra-governmental debt (the money it owes to other government accounts like Social Security). No matter how you look at it, it’s by far the highest level of debt Uncle Sam has accumulated in peacetime. It’s also shocking, considering the economy is growing faster than it has for a while. Even worse, there’s no end of that red ink in sight.

It’s truly scary how fast that debt is growing. At the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, in January 2009, U.S. debt was $10.6 trillion. Since then, we’ve more than doubled the national debt, adding $11.2 trillion, or averaging more than a trillion dollars a year. Let me say that again: In the last 10 years, the federal government has accumulated more debt than in its entire existence leading up to that period.

Also distressing is the bewildering lack of interest by both Republicans and Democrats to change the trajectory we’re on. The simple reality is that the only way to make a course correction is to reform so-called entitlement spending—Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security—and nobody wants to do that.

Donald Trump, the Republican president, has said repeatedly that he won’t touch Social Security and Medicare. Then there’s the speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, the same guy who was so passionately sounding the alarm about the need to reform entitlement back in the 2000s. Yet he’s done absolutely nothing on the issue ever since he became the head of the Republican House.