On Public Radio this morning an economist gave forth with some frightening numbers about this country private debt—credit card and home and business debt, not the public government variety. This private debt load was equal to about 50 percent of GDP in 2000 but had grown to 100 percent of GDP by 2007. And when was the last time private debt was 100 percent of GDP? “1929,” said the economist.

Such numbers by themselves don’t tell the whole story, however. The reason is that debt in and of itself is not a bad thing. If a family goes into deep debt to put its kids through college, for example, the big debt here will likely not only be paid back with great additional benefits to the family and its offspring, but to society as a whole in the form of more productive citizens.

So the question I asked myself after hearing about our private national debt load was this: What is the Bush years’ debt legacy?

Did it somehow morph into massive infrastructure improvements? Into a better educational system? Into bigger and more widely dispensed health care for everyone? Is our military stronger vis-a-vis the rest of the world? Did all the money spent to boost debt so significantly in the Bush years get spread around so it made more Americans richer than they were before the spending began?

The answer to all these questions and a host of others that might come to mind is a resounding “no.” As a nation what we got for all this added debt spending can be neatly summed up in a single word—bupkis, the literal definition of which won’t be given here because this is a family site, but a term that can more politely be rendered as zilch, nada, not a damn thing worth having.

There’s pain, much economic pain, ahead for a great many Americans in the next few years. But perhaps when things begin to look up again and we look back at these years we’ll see a country where recent spending won’t have to be summed up again with the b-word.