Pony up: $289,473 in interest is coming due

On really big numbers, the challenge of self-government, and the economic picture nobody likes to talk about

It’s hard to say whether there is any wake-up call that will ever truly break through on the state of America’s national budget. The numbers are just too unfathomably large -- like a projection that the interest alone on the national debt will cost $99 trillion over the next 30 years. Nobody is equipped to think in terms of trillions (that’s thousand-thousand-millions), and even the per-capita figures are a stretch: Spread across our current population of 342 million, that’s $289,473 in interest over 30 years. No matter what democratic socialist dreams come true, there aren’t enough “rich” to keep that price from falling on a lot of middle-class taxpayers.

■ Like the other aspects of self-government, the budget depends on us to keep ourselves accountable. It’s not an impossible problem to fix, but the longer we remain utterly undisciplined, the harder the choices required later on to correct the problem.

■ Debt isn’t necessarily bad on its own, nor necessarily is deficit spending -- the key is that we have to overspend (that is, deficit-spend) by less than the rate of growth of the economy. If the deficit is 1% of GDP, but the economy (that is, the GDP) is growing at 2% a year, then the overspending gets eclipsed by growth.

■ But if the deficit spending is 5.8% of GDP and the economy is struggling to grow consistently at a rate of 2%, then it’s pretty obvious we’re on an unsustainable path. (And we shouldn’t believe the fantastic claims that artificial intelligence will lead to unimaginable economic growth, either -- extraordinary claims call for extraordinary evidence, and that’s not on display yet.)

■ Growth is certainly a huge portion of the solution, but it’s hard to make a really gigantic economy grow fast. And some of the things that cost the most in the national budget are areas that get more expensive faster than the rate of inflation for everything else -- starting first and foremost with health care. We can do better than this, but the discipline deficit is the leading indicator that we’re unlikely to do enough in time.