It happened in 1975. I was still a young boy, and had just started my first term at a boarding secondary school in Ghana. At the time, all of the country’s secondary institutions were located in major towns and cities so children who grew up in villages, as I did, had to leave home to live on campuses. Because parents had to pay fees for their children to be educated in those places, access was essentially blocked for kids like me whose families were dirt poor.

It was only due to the most miraculous of circumstances that I ended up on that campus. The scholarship that enabled me to go to secondary school covered tuition, room and board, and supplies such as uniforms and stationery. So, in theory, I shouldn’t have had too much to worry about. But I did, in a big way. Even paying for transportation from my village to the campus was a huge challenge. My parents and siblings could only scrape together enough pennies for the bus ticket. There was no such thing as pocket money when I left home to go to the boarding house.

The village environment that I left had always been quite bleak. I had worked extremely hard and made some unimaginable sacrifices to get away from it to boarding school. I was determined to ensure that my escape would not be short-lived. But in those first few weeks on campus, I realized that I was living on a knife-edge. The scholarship provided a limited number of supplies so if I ever needed additional items, I would have to purchase them out-of-pocket.

Since there were no computers, cellphones or tablets back then, all note-taking was done on paper. I received five notebooks from the school bookstore for the term. In first year, we had close to ten courses in each term so on average, l used one notebook for two classes.

Realizing that I had no margin for error, I started taking some drastic measures. The notebooks had ruled sheets. To conserve resources, I decreased the font size of my text and began to fit two lines of text in each row on a page. Some of my classmates said it was the strangest thing they had ever seen. They wondered how I could read my notes. I never explained to them why I was doing that.

Raising my level of prudence even further, I later got into the habit of using one notebook for three courses. It meant that I didn’t need my full bookstore allocation. I perhaps could have obtained the leftover notebooks and sold them to some students for cash but I wasn’t aware of any such commercial activity on the campus so I simply left them uncollected. I was more than content with not having to bear any unaffordable expenses.

It was early on in that first term, in my constant state of anxiety about the precariousness of my situation on campus, that I had that life-altering experience. One boy had been missing from my class for several days and I was wondering what had happened to him. I didn’t have friends on campus then so I had no one to ask. In the dormitory one evening, I overheard one student telling another that the absent boy had been sent home for nonpayment of tuition. I had a panic attack. It was a vivid reminder of how perilous my situation was. Thus began my transformation to a life of extreme frugality.

I carried that mindset with me for the next several decades. Even now that I am relatively secure financially, the fear is always there. I watch my expenses like a hawk. It is because of this longstanding approach I have to life that I am endlessly baffled by this country’s apparent indifference to its rapidly ballooning national debt.

The U.S. national debt currently stands at $36.21 trillion. Like a pregnant woman’s belly, that huge bulge is physical evidence of some actions that took place in the past. Countries like China that are experiencing demographic declines and are desperately trying to boost birth rates will cheer when they see ladies with such protuberances in front of them on their streets. Our national debt pile is not something we can celebrate. We should be doing everything we can to stop the behaviors that caused it.

The Treasury Department’s FiscalData website explains how America developed its bulge. It says this: “Simply put, the national debt is similar to a person using a credit card for purchases and not paying off the full balance each month. The cost of purchases exceeding the amount paid off represents a deficit, while accumulated deficits over time represents a person’s overall debt.”

Because life happens, sometimes it becomes absolutely necessary to take out the credit card and swipe it, even though we may already have a high balance on the account. But every adult American knows how dangerous it is to do that too many times. The interest rates applied to unpaid credit card balances can run as high as 25 percent. If a cardholder doesn’t make a conscientious effort to pay off their debt, things can get out of hand very quickly.

America keeps pulling out its credit card, even when it doesn’t find itself in an emergency situation. It has been doing so for decades. That is how we got to $36.21 trillion, which is a scary number, even for the wealthiest nation on the planet. We may not be paying a 25-percent rate of interest on our accumulated debt, but because the amount is so large, any small percentage point that it is multiplied by ends up yielding a product that constitutes serious money, by any measure.

The national debt has been in the news quite a bit in the past week. On May 16, Moody’s, the credit rating agency, downgraded the credit rating of the U.S. from Aaa to Aa, citing the size of the national debt and growing budget deficits. Many analysts have said that the weak 20-year Treasury bond auction last week was a sign that investors are getting jittery about the U.S. fiscal situation. Following that tepid demand, the yield on the 20-year bond rose to 5.127 percent, the highest level since November 2023.

What exacerbated the financial markets’ nervousness last week was the new Republican budget that was being debated in the U.S. House of Representatives at the time. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the plan is expected to add $3.8 trillion more to the national debt over the next ten years. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has dismissed some of those fears. He argues that the extension of President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which the budget plan calls for, will spur economic growth and generate lots of additional revenues that will help pay down the debt. While that optimism may be comforting, past experience has shown that such dreams of bountiful tax revenues don’t always materialize.

Unlike Colonial America, today’s America has never had a reason to fit two lines of text in one row of a notebook page. Our contemporary nation has also never been asked to leave a school campus because it failed to pay its tuition. It is quite possible though, that one of these days, we will throw a big party and bond investors will decline our invitation to attend. We wouldn’t just suffer embarrassment in that case. That no-show would come with some real economic pain. We must rid ourselves of this false sense of security that we seem to have.