Fact: America's national debt stands at $17 trillion. That's a tough number to grasp. Most people will never come close to making $1 million in any given year. How can we understand the magnitude of the hole our country is in? Well, imagine you owed your credit card company $200,000. On top of that you have to pay them about $4,000 per year in interest. You are bringing in $150,000 per year, but you are spending way more than that. How are you going to ever pay back that $200,000 debt? And what happens if you default? Well, that is America today. The problem is clear. And we brought Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, to propose a solution. Donate today to PragerU! http://l.prageru.com/2ylo1Yt Joining PragerU is free! Sign up now to get all our videos as soon as they're released. http://prageru.com/signup Download Pragerpedia on your iPhone or Android! Thousands of sources and facts at your fingertips. iPhone: http://l.prageru.com/2dlsnbG Android: http://l.prageru.com/2dlsS5e Join Prager United to get new swag every quarter, exclusive early access to our videos, and an annual TownHall phone call with Dennis Prager! http://l.prageru.com/2c9n6ys Join PragerU's text list to have these videos, free merchandise giveaways and breaking announcements sent directly to your phone! https://optin.mobiniti.com/prageru Do you shop on Amazon? Click https://smile.amazon.com and a percentage of every Amazon purchase will be donated to PragerU. Same great products. Same low price. Shopping made meaningful. VISIT PragerU! https://www.prageru.com FOLLOW us! Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/prageru Twitter: https://twitter.com/prageru Instagram: https://instagram.com/prageru/ PragerU is on Snapchat! JOIN PragerFORCE! For Students: http://l.prageru.com/29SgPaX JOIN our Educators Network! http://l.prageru.com/2c8vsff Script: If you are under, say, 30, you have a tsunami-sized problem coming toward you, and you probably don’t even know it. That killer wave is the national debt. Countries, like people, go into debt when they spend more than they have. You and I buy things with the money we earn. Governments buy things with money they get from taxes. When spending outstrips revenue, the government is “in the hole.” Right now, the hole is $17 trillion dollars deep. This is an incomprehensible number. What is a trillion dollars, let alone $17 or 20 trillion? Common analogies like “you’d have to stack $1 bills 67,000 miles high to reach the current debt,” though impressive-sounding, don’t help much, if it all. So, let’s bring the problem down to earth. Right now, most investors believe the United States is a safe bet. They believe, in other words, that they’ll get the money they loan to the US back with interest. But this can’t go on indefinitely. At some point investors are going to say, “you have too much debt; you’re a bad risk. No more money.” What happens then? We don’t have to guess. We can look at Europe, specifically Greece. Investors were happy to loan Greece money until 2010, when it finally dawned on them that Greece couldn’t possibly pay them back. Almost overnight, Greece became a very bad credit risk and the economy went into a death spiral. Businesses failed. Thousands were thrown out of work. The government couldn’t pay its bills. Germany and the other European economies had to step in and bail Greece out. But the Greeks suffered terribly. The same thing happened in Portugal and Spain. Yes, the United States is much, much bigger than Greece and has a much more dynamic economy. That’s true. But the principle doesn’t change. We can borrow more money than Greece, but sooner or later, investors will say “no more.” And if they ever do, our economy will go into the same downward spiral the Greek economy did. Here’s another point. At the time I am giving this course, the interest on our debt is very low, around 2%. But what happens when the interest rate rises from 2% to the much more normal 5% -- as it inevitably will? Where is the U.S. going to get the money to pay the higher interest on its enormous debt? Do we borrow even more? Well, that just gets us deeper in debt. Raise taxes? Well, that cuts economic growth. Then there’s the question of who these investors are who are loaning us all this money. The biggest investor right now is China, not exactly a trusted ally. The more money they loan us, the more influence they have over us. Maybe they’ll never exercise this power, but do we really want to give them the option? For the complete script, visit https://www.prageru.com/videos/americas-debt-crisis-explained