What Did You Get For $216,313.29? What Did You Give Up?

A black hole.

Would you take on $216,313.29 in debt because someone told you that it was "necessary?" The interest payments alone mean you will spend less on food, shelter, and other daily expense just to cover the interest payments. You also must postpone or give up your important goals in life such as education, raising a family, better transportation, more eduction and anything else that depends on your future net income.

Whatever you thought was important is now erased. The government will now take big portion of your wages and you just need to "trust them." Do not worry, they will spend it better than you would anyway.

The crushing burden of debt is why people, when given the choice of taking on debt individually, do not take on near the debt that the government imposes on them. According to the New York Federal Reserve and other sources, the average household debt in the U.S. is about $32,000, excluding mortgages. This number, $32,000, represents the collective wisdom of over 170 million American households as to the amount of non-mortgage debt they are each willing to assume.

In his 2004 book "The Wisdom of Crowds," author James Surowiecki showed how collective knowledge can be superior to biased or conflicted experts. The case of the federal debt may be a case where the wise crowd gives a better answer. The so-called experts in this case include biased Keynesian economists and conflicted politicians who increase spending while paying with debt rather than increasing taxes.

Just how much has the federal debt diverged from the wisdom of the crowd? So much that in 2025 the expected U.S. federal debt per household will exceed $216,000. That is seven times more than the $32,000 household average of non-mortgage debt.

This is not a partisan thing -- both Democrat and Republican members of congress vote for deficit spending, and presidents of both parties sign off on government debt. And voters continue to let the government to take on debt orders of magnitude higher than they would take on themselves.

The Department of the Treasury has laid out the shocking facts about your debt on its fiscal data website: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov.

Nowhere on the website does it say, "debt crisis." But these words are used by many others, including the centrist think tank the Brookings Institution. In a recent article by Wendy Edelberg, Ben Harris, and Louise Sheiner they state: "... Analysts warn, however, that our nation’s growing debt will inevitably lead to a crisis."