Adam Griffin
    Staff Writer

As I type these words, the National Debt of the United States is $19,150,625,265,908. That is trillion with a capital “T.”

What does that mean? Can we imagine that much money or what it would take to pay it off?

It seems more like a fantastical amount of money than it does the legitimate sum of money borrowed against the full faith and credit of the US. And yet it is the truth; our government owes nineteen trillion dollars in debt.

We are fortunate that our power and position among nations globally is of such a stature that our economic stability and financial system cannot be undermined easily by foreign powers.

Even our own mismanagement has not been able to stop the wheel from turning — but forces are working against America, both foreign and domestic.

The national debt is one of the greatest threats to America, and it is of our own design.

Many famous Americans, from Abraham Lincoln to Ronald Reagan, have warned Americans that the country will not fall from foreign enemies, but instead will only be able to be brought down from within, if the people lose their way.

As a people, we have financially lost our way; we have lost sight of the necessity of good budgeting and made our once untouchable economic system into a house of cards because of our reckless spending.

The explosive national debt has weakened our dollar and given nations like China an ability to manipulate their own currency to create trade imbalances that favor them.

In fact, most of our economic woes can be linked to the astronomical national debt that affects all elements of our financial system. This detriment is brought about by the simple immorality of our debt.

Thomas Jefferson, writing to John Wayles Eppes in 1813 perfectly hit upon this moral point, saying, “We believe — or we act as if we believed — that although an individual father cannot alienate the labor of his son, the aggregate body of fathers may alienate the labor of all their sons, of their posterity, in the aggregate, and oblige them to pay for all the enterprises, just or unjust, profitable or ruinous, into which our vices, our passions or our personal interests may lead us. But I trust that this proposition needs only to be looked at by an American to be seen in its true point of view, and that we shall all consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our debts, and morally bound to pay them ourselves; and consequently within what may be deemed the period of a generation, or the life of the majority.”

His greatest political partner and friend, James Madison, echoed his concern.

Madison said, “I go on the principle that a public debt is a public curse, and in a Republican Government a greater curse than any other.”

Having debts imposes a form of national slavery to creditors — our country must return to the all-encompassing ideal of freedom if they are to economically liberate America.

The national debts are by nature immoral. When previous generations overspend, they pass this crippling weight onto proceeding generations.

This directly affects our generation and the country we will live in; the issue is more than just a political and economic concern — it’s a moral imperative.

Even in Jefferson’s time, this was true; the first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, wrote, “If it is not excessive, a national debt will be to us a national blessing.”

Although all debt exceeding its own generation is immoral and exceeds the usufruct of the current generation, excessive debt is not only immoral but detrimental to the generation that will inherit the exorbitant debt.