CBO: National Debt Will Pass $50 Trillion in 10 Years

AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

This seems like very bad news and it's made worse by the fact that the party that used to be focused on controlling the debt seems a lot less focused on it these days.

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The Congressional Budget Office said on Tuesday that the U.S. national debt is poised to top $56 trillion by 2034, as rising spending and interest expenses outpace tax revenues. The mounting costs of Social Security and Medicare continue to weigh on the nation’s finances, along with rising interest rates, which have made it more costly for the federal government to borrow huge sums of money.

As a result, the United States is expected to continue running large budget deficits, which are the gap between what America spends and what it receives through taxes and other revenue. The budget deficit in 2024 is projected to be $1.9 trillion, up from a forecast earlier this year of $1.6 trillion. Over the next 10 years, the annual deficit is projected to swell to $2.9 trillion. As a share of the economy, debt held by the public in 2034 will be 122 percent of gross domestic product, up from 99 percent in 2024.

The CBO assumes that Trump's tax cuts will expire next year but that's almost certainly not going to happen. If Trump wins he'll push to extend them and even Biden has said he'll continue the cuts for low-income earners. So no matter who wins the election the debt will likely go up a few trillion more than the CBO currently assumes. The new projection has already increased substantially from an estimate the CBO released in February of this year.

The expected deficit grew 27 percent from CBO’s last projection in February, mostly because of new spending laws passed after that report came out...

since then, Congress and Biden have been on a spending spree. Besides the annual appropriations, lawmakers also approved a $95 billion foreign aid bill to support Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan and make investments in the U.S. industrial base, and Biden announced plans to forgive billions of dollars in student loans.

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Each year the debt increases, so does the amount of money required to service the interest on that debt. Currently we're spending more than $100 billion per month on debt payments.

As Elon put it:

My friend Jon Gabriel presented this helpful chart.

FInally, here's John Stossel with a segment on the debt crisis.


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