Federal debt explodes by $1 trillion in five weeks since deal suspending limit became law

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CiscoKid

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The U.S. national debt has increased by $1 trillion in the five weeks since President Biden signed a bill into law that effectively turns off the debt ceiling until 2025.

According to Treasury Department data, the total national debt stood at $32.47 trillion on July 6, $1 trillion more than the $31.47 trillion level last seen on June 2. The national debt had been stuck at or near that June 2 level for months because the government had hit the debt ceiling and was legally prohibited from borrowing any more money.

On June 3, however, Biden signed legislation reflecting negotiations with House Republicans that requires a small spending cut next year and allows unlimited federal borrowing until 2025. With no debt ceiling in effect, federal borrowing jumped more than $350 billion in a single day and crossed the $32 trillion mark in less than two weeks.

The national debt has increased $4.7 trillion since Biden took office in January 2021, and is expected to keep rising in the face of annual budget shortfalls of at least $1 trillion per year. So far in fiscal year 2023, the government has spent $1.16 trillion more than it has collected and the Biden administration is predicting a $1.5 trillion budget deficit when the fiscal year ends in September.

Biden has continued to boast that he has shrunk the budget deficit.

"And by the way, parenthetically, I want you to hear about the deficit. I cut the deficit $1.7 trillion in two years," he said last week. "Nobody's ever done that – cut the debt $1.7 [trillion]."

But many mainstream news outlets have discounted that bragging point because the lower deficit mostly reflects the end of emergency spending related to COVID-19 and increased tax revenue that reflects the post-COVID economic recovery. When COVID hit in 2020, federal spending exploded by $2 trillion – the government spent a total of $6.5 trillion that year instead of the $4.4 trillion it spent a year earlier, and the budget deficit exceeded $3 trillion.

 
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So yeah, the deficit doubled with Covid and then returned to where the slope from 2015-2019 was projecting. I'm not seeing anything worth bragging about there.
 
Did we think anything OTHER than this would happen?

Does it even MATTER?

If destruction of the dollar doesn't wipe us out, the open borders will do it. War in the streets to start in three, two, one...
 
Is it time to start worrying about the debt?

This feels like a weird question to ask, I admit. The bond market is placid. Voters are preoccupied with other issues. The many dire things that fiscal hawks said would happen if we did not shrink the debt a decade ago have not come to pass. And neither party seems to have much interest in the country’s long-term fiscal trajectory; Democrats and Republicans recently walked away from debt-ceiling negotiations without doing much of anything.

Yet the country’s fiscal situation has changed dramatically, if quietly, in the past few years. Medicare and Social Security spending is climbing as the Baby Boomers age. The country’s borrowing costs, measured as a share of GDP, are at their highest level in two decades and rising. Despite strong growth, Washington is running as large a deficit as it was during the worst of the Great Recession. And the debt now stands at $32 trillion.

 
I'll help ya out. Here is the amount that the US has to spend on interest alone now. Almost a Trillion now on debt payments.


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In Japan it's worse. Their debt to GDP is 200%, but the jokes on them because their citizens hold most of the debt. Just like the old saying, "If I owe you $10k I have a problem, but if I owe you $!m YOU have the problem".
 
They've kept their interest rates low though in Japan. So I doubt their debt service payments are as hefty now but I am really just guessing.
 
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