Federal deficit shows we’re living in an age of trillions | Opinion

On Feb. 8, 2009, the Tennessean ran my guest column, “How much is a ‘trillion’?” with the subhead “Federal deficit soars to a scale that is difficult to understand.”

I wrote it because the Congressional Budget Office forecast that for the first time in history, the federal government’s annual budget deficit would exceed a trillion dollars, an enormous sum. Eight months later, when the fiscal year ended, that CBO forecast proved correct: the federal government’s FY2009 spending had exceeded revenues by just over $1.4 trillion.

Deficits are far from new. Every presidency since Herbert Hoover’s has included at least two deficit years, increasing the national debt. The last time federal revenues met or exceeded expenses was under President Bill Clinton, whose last four budget years (1998-2001) ran a surplus. Since then, every federal budget has run a deficit.

New in 2009 was the sheer size of the deficit, exceeding a trillion dollars. At the time, the idea of a trillion-dollar deficit seemed somehow otherworldly, far outside everyday experience. And where do things stand today, nearly 14 years later?

So far there have been seven annual deficits that exceeded $1 trillion, the one in FY2009 and six more. A couple of those deficits (FY2020 and FY2021) each exceeded $3 trillion. The most recent federal deficit (FY2022) is lower but still about $1.8 trillion. We’re living in an age of trillions.

The national debt was about $10.5 trillion when I wrote that guest column in 2009. When FY22 closed its books this year on Sept. 30, the national debt had grown to exceed $31 trillion, roughly 122% larger than the gross domestic product of nearly $26 trillion, as compared to 82% of the GDP in 2009.

Hear more Tennessee voices:Get the weekly opinion newsletter for insightful and thought-provoking columns.

What does this mean on an individual level? For the most recent fiscal year, our average per-person shares amount to over $5,300 for the annual deficit and about $93,000 for the national debt.

A trillion is an imposing number to behold, a one followed by 12 zeros: 1,000,000,000,000. It’s a thousand times bigger than a billion, a million times bigger than a million. Counting to a trillion takes more than a lifetime. Consider counting seconds: one, two, three, four, etc. A clock would require almost 32,000 years to tick off a trillion seconds.

Picturing $1 trillion isn’t much easier. One trillion $1 bills laid end to end would form a line that would extend from the surface of the Earth to a few million miles beyond the sun, some 93 million miles away.

The federal government’s FY22 spending exceeded $6 trillion, including $475 billion of net interest payment on the national debt, according to the Treasury Department. In order to spend $6 trillion in a single year without posting a deficit, the government would have to collect around $18,000 in taxes and other revenues for every man, woman and child in the United States. We have to wonder how long it will be before the annual interest payment itself reaches a trillion dollars.

Trillions without dollar signs are all around us. So far, about 3.6 trillion tons of carbon dioxide have taken up residence in our atmosphere. The age of the universe is roughly 5 trillion days. In a single year, a beam of light travels nearly 6 trillion miles at the fastest speed in the universe. Proxima Centauri, the star nearest to the sun, is just under 25 trillion miles from Earth. That the trillion is needed to describe so vast a scale is as sobering as it is inspiring.

Whatever else can be said, it’s clear that our overall economy and our government’s annual spending, annual deficit and accumulating national debt have reached astronomical proportions with far-reaching implications. They deserve our full and informed attention. Accepting that responsibility remains one of our biggest challenges.

Dennis G. Hall was formerly vice provost for research, dean of the graduate school, professor of physics and professor of electrical engineering at Vanderbilt University. At the end of 2015 he retired from Vanderbilt, where he is now dean-and-professor emeritus.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Opinion: Federal deficit shows we’re living in an age of trillions