I remember driving around with my Dad, and the AM radio was tuned to 850 WHDH. Dad loved that station because it featured a lot of Jazz programming. I recall most news reports ended with the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), and back in the day, that’s the 1960s, to be more specific-it hovered around 600, with talk about it never reaching 800. For comparison, the Dow closed September 9, 2026, at 52,380.66. Two things jump out at me with those two stats: we have come a long way, and the numbers are meaningless.
The other number that used to be reported, because back then it was a concern for most people, not including politicians, was the National Debt. In 1960, it was already a staggering $290.5 billion. It was talked about then because China was buying most of our debt, and that was seen as a future National Security problem. I’m not sure who would be foolish enough to buy American debt today, and I am quite sure nobody does. We just turn the printing presses up to high and churn out more useless paper.
We hit a milestone this week, and bells, whistles, and alarms of all sorts should have been sounding. Our National Debt broke the $40 trillion mark. I did not hear a word about it, and I am convinced that is because of two things: the number is so big that it is meaningless, and the debt has become so large that we will never be able to get it under control, so let that Debt Clock spin. If you happen to be a taxpayer, which is only one in three Americans, your share of the debt is $360,000. And you wonder why most people cannot afford a house. The interest payment on the debt is over $1 trillion a year, but I guess that only matters if you paid it. We are self-sufficient and don’t pay anything. We have to remember something about numbers and stats. “Statistics don’t lie, but liars use statistics.” Whenever a politician starts rattling off numbers and stats, you can be sure he or she is making them up on the fly, and no one ever challenges them. We used to hear politicians on the trail talk about paying down the Debt, but now that concept is unreachable, it is filed under do not disturb, or kick it down the road. You will never have to wait in anticipation of ever hearing about it again, until it is too late. I have to stop worrying about it because it will never be touched.
When you take a minute to see how the facts and numbers stack up against our kids, is it any wonder they are discouraged, disillusioned, and seeking alternatives? Is it any wonder that someone like Hassan Piker has 3 million followers and a young generation hanging on every word and buying everything he is selling? We built this monster, I guess it is our job to control it.
Author’s Note: Graphics created by Grok AI. Grok’s comments about the images: The image puts the 1960s AM-radio world Ray remembers—Dow hovering around 600, national debt already called “staggering” at $290 billion—next to the number that now barely registers: $40 trillion. The old radio and the tiny ticker are still there, but they are dwarfed by a clock that has outgrown any human sense of scale. Printing presses keep running because no one is left who will buy the paper; the $360,000 “your share” sits on a lawn no one can afford to buy. The young people walking toward their screens are the generation that inherited the monster and is now shopping for alternatives. The picture isn’t trying to shock anyone into action. It is simply showing why the bells and whistles never sounded: the number became so large it stopped being a number at all.
Content syndicated from Conservative View from New Hampshire with permission
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