W E T H E P E O P L E
We the Inheritors
Most of the $40T national debt was borrowed before you could vote, and you are already paying for it in places you may not understand.
The math ain’t mathin’
Student loans. The rate on a new federal student loan is set by law each May. It is the rate the government pays to borrow for ten years, plus a fixed add-on, so when the government's borrowing costs rise, your loan rate rises with them. This year's undergraduate rate is 6.52 percent.
A first home. Yale's Budget Lab estimates that federal borrowing added since 2015 has raised the cost of a 30-year mortgage on a median-priced home by about $2,500 a year. Over the life of the loan, that comes to about $76,000.
A car. The same study puts the extra cost of a typical auto loan at about $120 a year.
Starting something of your own. A typical small business loan costs about $770 more a year.
Your income. The Congressional Budget Office says that as the debt grows, less money goes into private investment, and over time workers end up with lower pay.
Your taxes. About 19 cents of every federal tax dollar goes to interest this year. That is projected to reach 31 cents within ten years and more than 50 cents by 2056, which covers most of your working life.
Your Social Security. The retirement fund your paycheck pays into runs short in late 2032. Unless Congress changes the law before then, every check after that gets cut by 22 percent.
None of these bills has a line that says "national debt," but it’s in all of them.
A trillion dollars a year, gone.
It builds nothing, helps no one.
This year the country will pay about $1 trillion in interest on the debt. That is more than the entire military budget, and none of it buys anything new.
Picture what you would do with $1 trillion a year. You might build something with it, or you might leave it in the paychecks it came from. Whatever you pictured, that money is already spent, and next year's interest bill is projected to be bigger.
The initiative has to come from outside the Capital.
You have not seen this country agree on much.
That is not a flaw in your generation but it is a fair description of the last twenty years.
Ignoring it or leaving doesn't get you out of it
Plenty of people your age have looked at all this and decided to ignore it, or maybe even living abroad. We get it, but neither one takes you off the list above. Your loans are still in dollars, and the decisions still get made by the people who stayed.
This is one of the few issues where everyone wants the same outcome. When enough of them put that in writing, candidates have to answer for it.
The plan, briefly
A constitutional amendment that ties the debt to the size of the economy. You make it a condition of your vote, we match you to your district, and every candidate running there sees how many of their own voters have done the same.
What happens after you sign
We match you to your district and add you to the count. Any candidate who wants your vote will have to look at that number. We only share the count, never your information.
Sources
$40 trillion: U.S. Treasury, Debt to the Penny, August 18, 2026. fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/debt-to-the-penny/
Student loan rates and how they are set: U.S. Department of Education, Federal Student Aid, Interest Rates for Federal Direct Loans First Disbursed Between July 1, 2026 and June 30, 2027 (June 4, 2026). The 10-year Treasury high yield on May 12, 2026 was 4.468 percent, plus 2.05 for undergraduate loans. fsapartners.ed.gov
Mortgage, auto loan and small business loan costs: Yale Budget Lab, The Impact of Deficits on Costs for Households, March 9, 2026. Estimates compare today's rates with rates in a scenario without the debt added by laws passed since 2015. Mortgage figure uses the 2025 third-quarter median home price. budgetlab.yale.edu/research/impact-deficits-costs-households
Pay: Congressional Budget Office, The Long-Term Budget Outlook: 2025 to 2055. cbo.gov/publication/61270
19 cents today: net interest of about $1 trillion against federal revenue, U.S. Treasury. 31 cents and more than 50 cents: Brookings, Spending, Taxes, and Deficits: A Book of Charts, April 2026, pages 9 and 79.
Social Security: Social Security Board of Trustees, 2026 Annual Report, June 9, 2026. Retirement fund depleted in the fourth quarter of 2032, with 78 percent of scheduled benefits payable. ssa.gov/oact/trsum/
About $1 trillion in interest, more than the military: Congressional Budget Office, The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036; U.S. Treasury, Combined Statement, outlays by function.