Every burden counted here falls hardest on the people with the most years left to carry it.
Texas is a young nation. Its median age is 35.9, against 39.2 for the United States. Just 13.9 percent of Texans are over 65, against 18.0 percent across the United States (Census, American Community Survey). That young workforce is doing two jobs for Washington at the same time.
It is bankrolling older states' retirements. Texas pays an estimated 8.7 percent of all U.S. Social Security taxes and draws only 6.7 percent of the benefits, a net 12 to 13 billion dollars a year leaving Texas to fund retirements somewhere else. Across 2019 to 2024 that is roughly 75 billion dollars shipped out, from a young workforce to an aging one, that it will never be repaid.
And it is inheriting the bill for everything else. The 3.2 trillion dollar debt share, growing about 150 billion a year in her name, on which the interest alone runs 72 to 80 billion a year and buys her nothing. The inflation that quietly took about 150 billion in a single bad year. None of that is abstract to a 25-year-old. It is a mortgage written in her name, due over the rest of her working life, and the interest on it buys her nothing at all. Run the debt share alone across the population and it comes to something like 100,000 dollars per Texan, climbing every single day she stays in the Union.
A young Texan's "share" of the federal ledger isn't a check in the mail. It's a lien. Independence is, more than anything else, a decision about whose future Texans' money is going to build. Washington's, or their own.