The national debt just hit $40 trillion. If the U.S. decided to pay that off at a cool $1 billion a year, we'd be debt-free in about 40,000 years — so, cool, normal, not concerning at all.
This week we're digging into how we actually got here. Turns out America has basically never not been in debt — we owed money before we even finished writing the Constitution. We'll trace the whole wild ride: how Alexander Hamilton picked a fight with half the founding fathers over who should pay for the Revolutionary War, how Andrew Jackson briefly got the debt down to zero (and immediately triggered an economic crash), how FDR and a British economist named Keynes convinced the country that borrowing money could actually be a strategy, and how the debt has ballooned, shrunk, and ballooned again through World War II, the Reagan years, the Clinton surplus, and the 2008 financial crisis.
Spoiler: debt itself isn't the villain of this story. What we borrowed for, how fast the economy was growing, and who ended up footing the bill — that's where things get interesting (and a little infuriating). By the end, you'll never hear a headline about the national debt the same way again.
If this type of history is your thing, this is basically the appetizer version of what's covered — in a lot more depth — in my self-paced U.S. History courses or in the individual curriculum units if you're a teacher who wants classroom-ready materials.
Podden och tillhörande omslagsbild på den här sidan tillhör
Emily Glankler. Innehållet i podden är skapat av Emily Glankler och inte av,
eller tillsammans med, Poddtoppen.
