The story should be leading every bulletin. The national debt has just risen to $40 trillion.

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That sum is unimaginable, for the same reason that intergalactic and subatomic distances are unimaginable. Our brains are not configured to compute on such scales. Perhaps for that reason, the breaking of the $40 trillion barrier has received less attention than it deserves.

So let me try, if not to contextualize the sum itself, at least to give you a sense of how it has grown. When Barack Obama left office in 2017, the debt stood at $19.95 trillion. That sum was abominable enough, and Republicans said so in no uncertain terms. The GOP program called it “an unprecedented legacy” for young Americans, and an “immoral” bequest. Mitt Romney memorably pointed out that Obama had borrowed more than all his White House predecessors put together.

Donald Trump was emphatic about the enormity of Obama’s record. “Barack Obama has doubled our national debt. Doubled it.”

That was in 2016.........

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