There’s a specific kind of money issue that keeps us up at night — the nagging worry about bills, loans, and an uncertain future. It’s the quiet dread that settles in when the mathematics of salary doesn’t quite cover the math of life.

Now, that personal anxiety magnifies to a national scale. The country has accumulated a massive loan — P17 trillion. It is a weight that prompts sober reflection.

Finance Secretary Ralph Recto, instead of looking worried, smiles and says that it’s not a liability, but an asset.

He redefined national debt in two ways: For the country, debt is an “asset” if used for projects like roads and schools that boost the economy; for citizens, the government’s debt (like bonds) is a safe “asset” for local investors, such as pension funds, providing returns for savers and retirees.

Most Filipinos, grounded in the inescapable reality of household budgets, would probably spit out their coffee in disbelief and think the government has lost its grip on reality. Because in the real world, a loan is a burden. It’s a responsibility, money owed, not money owned.

The argument that since 70 percent of our debt is domestic — owed to our own banks and institutions like the GSIS — it is money moving around within the family.

On paper, in the cold ledgers of a bank in Makati, that government IOU would be recorded as an asset. It represents a future stream of interest payments. This is precisely where the government narrative diverges from our lived reality.

Let’s follow the money trail. Where do these banks and the GSIS get their mountains of cash to lend? They get it from us.

That so-called “asset” is built on the lifetime of savings our parents scraped together. It’s funded by the monthly contributions of a public school teacher who has dutifully paid into her pension fund for 30 years. It’s the collective deposits of millions of sari-sari store owners, jeepney drivers, and office workers. The foundation of this entire financial pyramid is the sweat and sacrifice of ordinary Filipinos.

Therefore, when the government celebrates this debt as a circulating “asset,” it is a magician’s trick. If the government, our collective head of household, struggles under the weight of these payments — if it needs to raise taxes or cut services to keep up — it is our financial security that is getting squeezed. It is our pensions that feel less certain, and our children’s future that becomes mortgaged.

Calling this debt an asset is not a harmless play on words, but a dangerous downplaying of a critical situation. It is putting a cheerful, bright-red bow on a box full of IOUs. What we need from our leaders is not clever rebranding, but raw honesty and a clear, actionable plan.

We must ask the tough, dining table questions: Are we taking out this massive family loan to invest in things that will make us genuinely richer tomorrow? Are we building schools that will unleash a generation of innovators? Are we building railways that will create real, lasting wealth?

Or are we just borrowing to pay the interest on past loans?

The first step to solving any problem is to stop pretending it’s something it’s not. Our national debt is our single biggest collective liability — a weight on the shoulders of every Filipino today and a burden we are passing on to our children tomorrow.

We cannot wish it away with positive thinking and clever accounting. We must manage it with prudence, transparency, and a relentless focus on building a productive economy that can actually bear its weight.

Our debt is a loan, not a treasure. And it’s time we started acting like it is. Sugar-coating will not change the fact that it is a debt.