As the United States’ gross national debt recently surged past the $38 trillion mark, commentators hastened to ring alarm bells. And surely the figure is eye-popping. But as someone who was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1984 on the very platform of fiscal responsibility—and who was the first practicing CPA ever elected to Congress—I want to sound a more fundamental warning: the number may be much less meaningful than meets the eye. We will never truly know what the national debt really is, or tackle it effectively, unless we adopt full-GAAP accounting at the federal level.

An old warning grows more urgent

When I ran for Congress, it was nearly a long-shot race. No one expected the first practicing CPA to win, but I did—and I did so on the idea that the national books of the U.S. govern

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