Oct 1, 2016 4 min read

As if Donald Trump himself isn’t scary enough, with his “braggadocious” self-regard and woeful lack of preparedness for the presidency, he has spent much of his campaign trying to frighten the wits out of voters. By now, the litanty is familiar: Muslims are coming to kill us; Mexicans are coming to rape us and kill us; city streets are bullet-scarred hellscapes; our military has become a 98-pound weakling; and on and on the demagogue’s tally of tribulation goes.

In last Monday’s debate, he also bellowed about the national debt, saying it was $20 trillion and offering it as a rationale for why the federal government can’t invest in alternative energy research, even though such research takes up an infinitesimal slice of a budget that mostly goes to the Pentagon and so-called entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. The total debt is actually $18.1 trillion, but given all the whoppers Trump offers up, we’ll let him get away with rounding the debt up to the nearest zero.

The nation’s debt has long been a hunk of red meat tossed at voters who believe the federal government – or, at least, whoever happens to be leading it at that point – is wildly profligate and that severe cuts must be put in place in order to spare us from becoming an economic basket case like Venezuela or Greece or Germany in the decade before Adolf Hitler’s ascension to power.

The reality of the national debt, however, is that it is much more manageable and much less alarming than many tub-thumpers would have us believe. The federal government has carried debt for most of its history, with the exceptions of 1835 and 1836, during the administration of Andrew Jackson. Rather than consider the dollar amount of the national debt, it’s perhaps more useful to look at it in terms of its relation to our gross domestic product. Even though it’s $18 trillion now, the debt was proportionately greater at the end of World War II, after the federal government had gone on a spending spree to fight in Europe and the Pacific. Even as the debt increased in the decades after World War II, it fell relative to the size of the entire economy thanks to the postwar boom that had Americans moving to suburbs and traveling on highways that were financed by, yes, federal dollars.

It’s frequently said the federal government needs to “be like American families” and “live within its means” and “tighten its belt.” But, as Taylor Tepper pointed out earlier this year in Money magazine, households actually carry a greater debt burden relative to the revenue they bring in than the federal government. Mortgages, car loans, student loans and credit card debt all exceed what most families earn in a given year. But “what matters to families isn’t their total debt; it’s their ability to service those obligations,” Tepper wrote. In 2015, interest payments on the national debt cost Uncle Sam $225 billion, just 7 percent of the revenue it took in.

It also should be noted, while he was hollering about the national debt, Trump’s own plans would do a great deal to enlarge it. He has proposed deep tax cuts while, at the same time, pumping up military spending, dramatically increasing infrastructure spending and not altering the Social Security and Medicare benefits his older supporters depend on. A report released last week by the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found, if his proposals were enacted, they would increase the debt by $5 trillion – considerably more than the $1.6 trillion Hillary Clinton’s agenda would tack on to the debt.

Simply put, when it comes to the national debt, Donald Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

But is that a surprise?