The U.S. national debt has soared to a staggering new high, crossing the $38 trillion threshold for the first time — a grim reminder of Washington’s relentless borrowing spree. Treasury Department figures released Wednesday put the total at $38,019,813,354,700.26 as of October 21.
It marks yet another rapid climb, with the country adding another trillion dollars in debt just two months after breaching the $37 trillion mark in mid-August, and less than a year since it first crossed $36 trillion last December. The speed of the increase highlights a troubling trend: America’s debt is ballooning at a rate never before seen in peacetime.
Much of the surge stems from demographic pressures. As America’s population ages, spending on Social Security and Medicare continues to climb, driving entitlement costs ever higher.
But it’s not only social programs fueling the problem. A growing share of federal spending now goes toward servicing the debt itself. Higher interest rates — imposed by the Federal Reserve to tame inflation — have made borrowing dramatically more expensive, creating a feedback loop that compounds the problem.
Michael A. Peterson, CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, told FOX Business that “reaching $38 trillion in debt during a government shutdown is the latest troubling sign that lawmakers are not meeting their basic fiscal duties.”
He added that the pace of borrowing is accelerating beyond historical norms. “If it seems like we are adding debt faster than ever, that’s because we are. We passed $37 trillion just two months ago, and the pace we’re on is twice as fast as the rate of growth since 2000.”
Peterson warned that the exploding cost of interest payments is draining resources that could otherwise be used for public investment. He noted that over the past decade, interest expenses cost the U.S. about $4 trillion — a figure projected to skyrocket to $14 trillion in the next ten years. Those mounting costs, he said, “crowd out important public and private investments in our future, harming the economy for every American.”
In the fiscal year that ended on September 30, the federal deficit hit roughly $1.8 trillion. Analysts expect that figure to worsen as entitlement spending and debt-servicing obligations continue to expand.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that by 2035, debt held by the public — the metric economists often use to gauge fiscal health — will surge from around 100% of GDP in 2025 to about 120% of GDP. Over that same period, annual deficits are forecast to reach $2.6 trillion, with a staggering $22.7 trillion added to the national debt over the next decade.
A major factor driving those deficits is the steep rise in interest payments. The CBO estimates that net interest costs will climb from $1 trillion this year to $1.8 trillion by 2035.
By then, total federal spending is projected to reach $88 trillion — about 23.6% of the nation’s GDP — while revenue will hover around $65 trillion, or 17.5% of GDP. That spending level is far above the 50-year average of 21.1% of GDP, while revenue is only slightly above its long-term norm of 17.3%, reflecting a widening gap between what Washington takes in and what it continues to spend.
{Matzav.com}
Ty trump. Ur policies are a failure. America is bankrupt.