My title, of course, comes with an IRONY ALERT!
I have had six goes at typing $18 trillion but after the first seven noughts I get confused and then my eyesight isn't good enough to count them all and I just know if I am one nought out 'JK' will be on me in a shot! Anyway, my American friends, this is just to tell you that $18 trillion is what you owe and come the day Barney Magroo's, er, 'family' who left the liquor business decades ago and moved into high finance will demand ever bigger and bigger interest rates in case you rat them out! Although, of course, you can't rat them out because your entire country would look like Detroit times a hundred!
As it happens, Zero Hedge features an article explaining some of the Big Lies the pols tell you about your national debt, for example, the last time that an American government actually decreased the debt was back in Eisenhower's day! Since then the pols have spent and borrowed and spent some more and then borrowed some more - and you suckers voted for them!
Alas, speaking of suckers, I don't know why I bother straining my eyes across the Atlantic when there are several million of them on this Island here. Our National Debt just topped £4 trillion. Yesterday we had to endure the sight and sound of sundry lying liars telling us that they were going to build zillion-pound tunnels under Stonehenge, motorways to here, there and everywhere, Dave's high speed trainset is still going ahead and ... and ... well, I can't go on, I might begin to weep!
And before you Brits leap in here to damn this, that or the other politician, just ask yourself what chance any British political party would stand at the election if it advocated privatising, say, just half of the National Health Service so that people would have to pay for many of its services? Yeeeeeeees, quite!