Excerpts from the Introduction The Terrorism of Debt Today, terrorism has crowded out the economy as public fear #1. That is understandable. Terrorism is fast, bloody, seemingly unstoppable, and relentlessly indiscriminate in creating its victims. Nevertheless, at the heart of the American economy today is a national debt that is unsustainable--in fact, nearly unimaginable--and it is terrorism in a different form. The Introduction diagnoses, defines, and quantifies our economic terror, its causes and its consequences. As for its victims, they are mature generation today who is less well off than the generation before them, and a rising generation doomed to amputated aspirations and a compromised future--perhaps even worse. Although government numbers calculate the national debt as approaching $20 trillion, some credible non-governmental but non-partisan economists believe it is actually closer to $210 trillion. How did this happen to us? What can we do about it? The Introduction outlines an approach to the answers. During the week of December 4-8, 2015, the CBS News/New York Times Poll asked 1,275 Americans nationwide what they thought were "the most important problems facing this country today." For month after month, year after year, the top response had been "the economy." But this time, it was "terrorism"--14% confessed themselves terrified over terrorism versus 12%, concerned about the economy. It seems that ISIS and its misbegotten brethren were not only invading territory in Africa and the Middle East, but also taking over a big piece of the American psyche. This is understandable. Terrorism is fast, bloody, and indiscriminate in creating its victims. Terrorism is, well, terrifying--and not just for those directly impacted, those who actually hear the gunshots, feel the explosions, experience the loss. On some days, all 24 hours of the 24-hour cable news cycle are devoted to it. It is visual and therefore visceral. It bleeds, so it leads. ISIS makes threats, carries out threats, and creates homicidal followers who wear masks, tactical clothing, suicide vests, carry assault weapons, and hurl pipe bombs. The national debt? It's just a number! At the moment, that number happens to be $18.8 trillion. Can you hear it? Can you feel it? Does it send a chill of terror up your spine? Probably not. And that is because the number alone, big as it is, does not paint a picture of the human cost of a failing economy: families imperiled, aspirations amputated, compromised futures abandoned. Today, novels and films recall the Great Depression not by reciting the numbers, horrifying as they are, but by showing the searing, compassionate photographs of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, quoting from John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath , or playing newsreel footage of threadbare figures shuffling, bone-tired, in breadlines. These are things we can see and feel. But a trillion? What is it? How much is it? The easy answer is one million million or 1012 or a 1 with twelve zeros following it. But that hardly grabs the gut. A friend of mine tried to get beyond pure numbers by picturing something really big yet familiar and measuring it with something familiar. The planet Earth is really big and we really live on it. If you measured its circumference in humble inches, surely you would at least learn what a trillion or even more inches look like. So, the circumference of Earth at its greatest girth, the Equator, is 24,901 miles--which converts to 1,577,727,360 inches. On your hands and knees, measuring out with thumb and index finger one inch after another, crawling over desert and swamp and mountain range, floating over oceans, once around the Equator ends up as 1.6 billion inches. With a "B." Repeat this journey about 634 times, and you finally come up to a trillion--with a "T." (Then hear the news that at least some economists believe the real national debt is closer to $210 trillion .... But that is a story for later.) Big numbers seem to turn off one part of the human brain while turning on another. That's a problem for this book, which deals with our unsustainable national debt, the reasons behind it, and what we can do about it. What is a trillion? 1012 or much, much more than the number of inches in a hands-and-knees trek along the equator. And now we can move on to another question and another metaphor. What is a sinkhole? Answer #1: It is a hole in the ground that appears when the surface layer of that ground collapses. It may be no more than a yard wide by a yard deep or it may be as much as two thousand feet across and two thousand feet deep. Answer #2: On Thursday, February 28, 2013, Jeff Bush, age 37, was in the bedroom of the home he shared with his brother Jeremy in Seffner, a suburb of Tampa, Florida. He was just turning in for the night. Later, Jeremy told CNN's AC360 that he heard a crash and thought a car had hit the house. The next thing was Jeff's scream. "I ran toward my brother's bedroom because I heard my brother scream," Jeremy told CNN. "Everything was gone. My brother's bed, my brother's dresser, my brother's TV. My brother was gone." Jeremy Bush ran to get a shovel, leaped into the void that moments earlier had been the solid concrete slab forming the room's floor. He dug at the rubble until police officers arrived and rescued Jeremy as the void relentlessly grew to 20 feet across and 20 feet deep. "I couldn't get him out. I tried so hard. I tried everything I could. I could swear I heard him calling out." There are several definitions of the national debt, but we can begin by defining it in two ways. Definition #1: The United States national debt is the sinkhole on which we stand. Definition #2: The United States national debt is what we the people collectively owe to our government's lenders. Let's break it down a bit. The figure most often cited as our national debt (right now, roughly $18.8 trillion) includes debt held by so-called federal accounts, which are also known as "intragovernmental holdings." This is money the nation borrows from itself. Strange as that sounds, it works like this: the Treasury holds some 230 "trust funds," which are stacks of money collected for specific purposes designated by law. To take the biggest example, the payroll taxes withheld from our paychecks go into a trust fund to finance Social Security and Medicare. From time to time, the Treasury borrows money from one trust fund--primarily the big one, Social Security/Medicare--to deposit into another in order to fund some other expense. When the pizza guy appears at the door, I might reach into my pocket, come up short, and take a few dollars from my cookie jar. I may or may not choose to replenish this cookie jar fund. After all, it's all my money. When the U.S. Treasury dips into one government cookie jar to replenish another, however, this is an act of borrowing from a legally constituted trust fund. That means that it must, at some specified time, be paid back to fund the purpose or program for which the fund was created. So, it is an actual debt. But because it is a government debt owed to the nation itself and no interest is charged, it is not considered part of the "public debt," which consists of money owed to entities outside of the government. The U.S. national debt is the largest in the world for a single country. It is about the same size as the debt of the entire European Union, a debt that consists of the combined national debts of all twenty-eight EU countries. Why the national debt got so big Now that we have looked the national debt in the eye . . . it is time to move from the how to the why . President Ronald Reagan is praised--and by some condemned--for having answered the why decades ago, in his 1981 inaugural address. Government is why. "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Government is the reason for the immensity of the national debt. Many of Reagan's disciples declare that all government is bad, and big government is plain awful. End of story. Some of Reagan's critics point to the quotation from the inaugural address as the essence of Reagan's reductionism. It's too simple, too pat. Period. The fact is that what is most frequently quoted from the speech is not actually what President Reagan said. Look it up. He began the speech by laying out the situation into which, as president, he was walking. It was "one of the worst sustained inflations of our national history." After describing it in admirably sharp detail, he concluded, "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." That introductory clause is key, because it does not simply define government as a problem, but as the problem "in this present crisis." The necessary implication is that government does have a role to play--it is the solution--sometimes and in some things. Certainly, President Reagan's record in office bears this out. On his watch, this so-called advocate of small government presided over the nation's first national debt measurable in the trillions, personally adding $1.86 trillion (186 percent) to the Carter debt, thereby creating a national debt of $2.8 trillion and raising taxes eleven times during his eight-year administration. Government is not the problem, not always and not in all things. Big government isn't even the problem. But unsustainably big government is. Excerpted from Full Faith and Credit: Debt, Taxes, Spending, and the Bankrupting of America by Alan Axelrod All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. 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