Tonight is the State of the Union speech. If it follows the routine of previous GOP presidencies, Trump will use our national debt as an excuse to call for more tax breaks for billionaires along with drastic cuts to social spending, just like Reagan, Bush, and Bush did.“The national debt is the United States’ next great war,” Jodey Arrington, the top Republican on the House Budget Committee, thundered this month about our $38 trillion national debt and $1 trillion annual interest payments on that debt.If we’re going to use his war analogy to describe this very real crisis, the first shots were fired in 1981, when Republicans’ so-called supply-side tax cuts began a 45-year upward transfer of over $50 trillion in wealth that made billionaires fabulously rich while it hollowed out our nation’s Treasury. They stole $38 trillion from our government, and another $12 trillion (at least) from working class families via wage freezes and the destruction of unions.Ever since 1981 — when our national debt was less than a trillion dollars — Republicans have eagerly slashed taxes for their Epstein-class billionaire donors, ballooned deficits, and then cynically blamed teachers, seniors, and working families for the red ink.Now they warn of catastrophe, but the real catastrophe is the annual payment — now officially a trillion dollars a year in interest — for GOP policies that funneled public wealth upward while starving the middle class.For 45 years we were told by Reagan, Bush, Bush, Trump, and their billionaire backers and think tanks that cutting taxes on the morbidly rich and giant corporations would unleash prosperity. Instead, those tax cuts have collectively drained at least $38 trillion out of the federal treasury.Thirty-eight trillion dollars. That number is so large it barely fits in the human imagination, so let’s translate it:Thirty-eight trillion dollars is roughly what it would cost to fund a Medicare-for-All-style universal health care system for a decade. In other words, we could have guaranteed health care as a right in America for ten years — every doctor’s visit, every prescription medication, every surgery and ER visit — and still had money left over. And because it would eliminate the need for Medicare and Medicaid, we could run it for a lot longer than just a decade.It’s more than 20 times the entire federal student loan debt that our young people are groaning under. We could have made college free and wiped out every penny of student debt in this country over and over again, freeing tens of millions of Americans to buy homes, start businesses, and raise families instead of mailing checks to banks for decades.It’s enough money to build tens of millions of affordable homes. Even at $300,000 per unit — a generous estimate — $38 trillion could pay for well over one hundred million homes. That wouldn’t just reduce housing costs; it would fundamentally reset the housing market and break the back of the affordability crisis that’s crushing the middle class.It’s enough to make universal pre-K permanent for generations. And, at the same time, it could have made community college tuition-free nationwide, rebuilt every crumbling bridge, modernized the entire electric grid, gotten us off fossil fuels while it hardened our infrastructure against climate disasters, and still left trillions in the bank for health care and education.Instead, we used that money to lower income and estate taxes on the very wealthiest Americans, and then Republicans turned around and pointed to the resulting debt as proof that we “can’t afford” child care, education, a green economy, health care, or housing.We also just officially hit a trillion dollars a year just in interest payments on the national debt. That’s money that doesn’t educate a child, doesn’t insure a family, and doesn’t build a single home. It’s simply a transfer to bondholders, the majority of whom are already-wealthy investors and financial institutions.And what could the $1 trillion a year we’re now paying as interest on the national debt buy instead?It could permanently expand Affordable Care Act subsidies and dramatically reduce premiums for millions of working families, and still leave hundreds of billions for other priorities.It could fund universal pre-K across America several times over.Two years of those interest payments would be enough to eliminate essentially the entire federal student loan portfolio.One trillion dollars a year could finance housing construction at a scale not seen since the World War II mobilization, ending both homelessness and skyrocketing rents.And here’s the cruelest irony: this Republican national debt and its associated interest burden exists solely because of those tax cuts.The GOP’s “Two Santas” strategy — cut taxes when a Republican is in the White House, then scream about deficits when a Democrat takes over — has produced exactly what its author, Jude Wanniski, wanted it to produce.