The Five Trillion Dollar Man

"Debt held by the public" is the kind of borrowing that must be paid back. As a claim on the Gross Domestic Product (the sum of all our endeavors) it has about doubled during the Obama presidency. Another way of saying this is that Mr. Obama has cost us as much as all his predecessors combined. (The curve, to be sure, was already bending up in the last year of George W. Bush's presidency.)

This year's deficit will again exceed a trillion dollars, bringing the total debt added during this presidency to an astonishing $5,000,000,000,000. Nothing like this has ever happened before. It's possible that the American economy is strong enough to recover from such a burden, but it's certainly not a sure thing. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford