Economy

By offering money and lucrative benefits, including full tuition funding with a salary, the CAF (and therefore the government) are feigning generosity and altruism. In reality, they are simply exploiting the economic situation of young people, a situation they themselves are worsening by cutting funding for education and healthcare, and by remaining inactive in the face of the soaring unemployment crisis among 15- to 24-year-olds, which reached a record 14.3 percent in April 2026, surpassing the levels of the 2008-09 crisis. They are simply trying to sell us what they are stealing from us, at the cost of our lives.

The number itself is almost impossible to picture. What is easier to picture is how fast it arrived.

192 Years to the First Trillion, 5 Months to the Latest

When the national debt crossed $1 trillion for the first time on October 22, 1981, President Ronald Reagan called it an almost incomprehensible sum. He told Americans that a trillion dollars in $1,000 bills would make a stack 67 miles high. It had taken the country 192 years, from the founding of the federal government in 1789 through 39 presidents, two world wars, and the Great Depression, to accumulate it.

Today's stack of $1,000 bills would reach roughly 2,700 miles, about the distance from New York City to Los Angeles.