A quarter sounds about right, and that's a quarter of our debt that could've been used to rebuild decaying infrastructure, increase medical care, housing, etc. Aside from the monetary cost the country will loose out on the dividends those sort of investments would've yielded long term.
Sure the US may still have a higher quality of life than many others, it doesn't mean that Americans lives couldn't have been better. Also I believe the US recently actually had decreases in both life expectancy and younger generations prospering fincially. So we didn't collapse, but we're not healthy either.
