By Phil Lawler, Catholic Culture - Would you be alarmed if I told you that the federal government, by administrative decree, had just added $100,000 to your mortgage?.. No, let me be more accurate, to illustrate my point. The added debt would be $100,000 per person... Larger families would owe more... Now of course the government has not issued such a decree. But the overall federal debt has just reached $33 trillion.