The National A Serio Conce Americ K icking the can down the road is a chronic malfunction of Congress when it has to deal with tough issues. One of these issues is the escalating national debt, now being further exacerbated by the current Biden–Pelosi–Schumer runaway spending spree. Yet most economists agree the national debt is on a genuinely unsustainable path with far reaching adverse implica-tions. Critical and enforced change in the conduct of Congress and the executive branch is needed. to 2019, the budget balanced only 14 percent of the time. The national debt is not an amor-phous or imaginary issue. Sadly, its importance and implications are chronically deflected and ducked by big-spender politicians in vague federal budgetary rhetoric who are essentially saying, “We have to do something [ . . . ] at some point down the road.” For example, in her confir-mation hearing on January 19, 2021, Treasury Secretary Yellen could not define the ultimate debt limit. She dodged giving a number and implic-itly signaled her long-held view that tax increases are the solution to paying only the interest on the ever-increasing national debt—not the principal: situation, but one metric that I do think is useful to keep in mind is the interest burden of the debt— what share of our economy, of GDP is going to pay interest on the debt. The higher that gets, the more we find we have to use tax revenue just to pay the interest on the debt. [ . . . ] That would be an unsustainable path. The Current National Debt Situation The US Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reports that the federal govern-ment’s total public debt—borrowed from the US public through, for example, bonds—was $21 trillion at the end of 2020 and 100.1 percent of the national gross domestic product (GDP). For 2021, the debt is expected to grow to almost $22.5 trillion, or 102.3 percent of GDP. However, The practice of balancing the budget and keeping little to no national debt effectively disappeared after the 1930s because of FDR’s New Deal depression response and World War II mobilization. The United States had a balanced budget in 68 percent of the years from 1791, when the country was founded, to 1929, but from 1930 28 • AMAC Magazine I think there’s no single metric that summarizes our overall fiscal
AMAC Magazine May 2021: Page 28
