Federal government debt rose from $3.3 trillion in 2001, to $10.1 trillion in 2011, to $23.0 trillion in 2021. Under current law, the CBO expects debt to rise to $35.8 trillion by 2031. If Congress passes the spending increases in the Democratic budget resolution, debt will rise to $40.1 trillion by 2031, according to CRFB. This is “debt held by the public,” meaning federal borrowing from domestic and foreign creditors.

The chart scales the debt to the number of U.S. households. Debt per household under the Democratic plan would rise from $179,082 in 2021 to $288,047 by 2031. That debt is not like mortgage debt where households have a hard asset to match what they owe. Rather, it is the government going on a consumption spending spree and putting $288,047 on each household’s credit card. That is because just 5 percent of federal spending is for hard assets such as highways and fighter jets. By ballooning the debt today, politicians are imposing large and rising burdens on households tomorrow.

Here are further observations:

• Federal debt today is 103 percent of GDP and would rise to 119 percent by 2031 under the Democratic spending plan. That level of debt is higher than the 31 percent reached in the Civil War, 33 percent reached in World War I, and 106 percent reached in World War II. Today we are not at war, and politicians show no interest in paying down the debt as they did after past wars.
• Bill Clinton was the last president to balance the budget, but the chronic red ink began in the 1930s with the rise of Keynesian economics and the invention of auto‐​pilot entitlement programs. Deficit spending has been supercharged in recent years by the rise in global capital markets, which makes vast borrowing much easier. From 1791 to 1930, federal politicians balanced the budget 68 percent of the years, but since 1931 they have balanced it only 13 percent of the years.
• America’s combined federal and state government debt in 2021 at 141 percent of GDP is far higher than the OECD average of 100 percent of GDP, and much higher than debt levels in Australia, Denmark, Ireland, Israel, Germany, Korea, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Sweden.
• Rising debt may trigger an economic crisis with soaring interest rates and falling output. Greece’s debt crisis a decade ago created long‐​lasting damage, and the country’s real income per capita is still down one‐​quarter from its pre‐​crisis level. America’s government debt today is about the same size relative to GDP as was Greece’s before its debt crisis.
• With the Democratic spending plan, federal interest costs will top $1 trillion a year by 2031. But that assumes the CBO baseline projection of interest rates rising only to 1.9 percent on short‐​term federal debt and 3.2 percent on long‐​term debt. I think that is a rosy scenario. The risk is on the upside. If interest rates rise more than projected, it will have a huge budget impact because the debt is so large.

Chris Edwards

When I came to Washington, D.C., in 1985, Ronald Reagan was president. I was working for the Reagan budget office. We did something we weren’t very proud of at the time. We introduced the first $1 trillion budget in American history, which was unthinkable. One trillion dollars. There are 12 zeroes in a trillion. A trillion is a million dollars times a million. The budget deficit hit $200 billion and 6% of our entire GDP. Again, unthinkable.

Now, fast forward 37 years later. The budget today is nowhere close to $1 trillion. In 2021, President Joe Biden’s first year in office, the federal spending came in at just under $7 trillion ($6.81 trillion, to be exact). So, in less than four decades, the budget has grown sevenfold. Much faster than inflation. Much faster than the economy. The government is now gobbling up the economy, spending up to 30% of our national output. Add state and local spending, and we are close to 40%.

We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on unemployment insurance programs with no quality controls, so more than $100 billion was doled out to fraudulent claims. Billions of dollars went to criminals living in Nigeria, South Africa and Mexico. That’s some stimulus to the economy. The Wall Street Journal found that we spent tens of billions of dollars on the New York subway system even though ridership is down by two-thirds. We could practically be giving every rider a free limousine service, which would be cheaper for taxpayers. According to the Wall Street Journal, more money has gone to the New York subway system than all of the federal money for COVID-19 treatments.

We spent so much money on welfare programs that many families with two unemployed parents collecting all the government payouts could get $100,000 or more from taxpayers and not work a single hour.

continue to provide billions of dollars a year to subsidize wind and solar power, which accounts for about 7% of our total energy production.

Much of the $100 billion for schools remains unaccounted for. No one seems to know where the money went, and nobody seems to care or wants to do anything about it.

The $6.8 trillion the government spent in 2021 was $2.4 trillion more than the government spent in 2019 before the pandemic started. The feds have spent close to $4 trillion in two years to contain COVID, which hasn’t been contained. Gee, that’s been money well-spent!

Could things with the virus be any worse if the government had spent nothing and there had been no shutdowns? This might be the most epic failure of big government in world history.

Yet Biden is saying with a straight face that the problem with the economy and inflation and runaway energy prices is that we didn’t spend $5 trillion (SET ITAL) more (END ITAL) for his Build Back Better monstrosity. So, we have a House Budget Committee chairman, when asked about the wisdom of running $2 trillion deficits each year, saying: “We can spend and borrow whatever we want.” No worries. They’re spending money like it’s M&Ms.

Even the New York Times admitted that Biden’s spending schemes offer Americans “cradle to grave government.” Is that what Americans want? Are we like Linus, the “Peanuts” cartoon character who carries his blanket like a security vest everywhere he goes?

Biden’s solution to the budget and borrowing blowout is to tax, tax, tax. But in 2021, Americans paid $4 trillion in federal taxes. That was 18% of our GDP, which is above the recent historical average. There is not a revenue problem today in Washington but a pandemic of spending. In my new book, “Govzilla,” I document the relentless historical growth of government in America. We were supposed to have limited government but now we have limitless government. In just his first year, the spending proposed under Biden exceeds what was spent on all the wars we have fought, the building of the intercontinental railroad, the interstate highway system and the moon landing.

The spending monster Govzilla is devouring our economy and our freedoms. At least Reagan tried to fight back against the tyranny of big government — sometimes successfully, sometimes not. His warning when he ran for president in 1980 was as prescient now as it was then: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have.”

Meanwhile, Biden says that his trillions of dollars in spending “are free — they will cost nothing.” Actually, the costs are incalculable.

Stephen Moore

Before the year is out, nearly $10 trillion may have been added to the national debt from all the spending done by a “bipartisan” majority in the Imperial City.

Critics condemn them for saddling future generations with inconceivable debt. But it’s far worse than that. The damage is being done NOW — to US. It will destroy us, and in the process wipe out any possibility of a future for those generations 50 or 100 years down the road.

The reason is not just the spending; it’s what the government is actually DOING. Under the guise of an “infrastrucuture” bill, the legislation does things like mandate the elimination of fossil fuels on the highway within a decade. What do you think that will do, not just to personal travel, but to the ability of businesses to transport food and medical supplies? It doesn’t happen by accident, or by magic. And it will take more than magic or accident to restore the damage done when millions of people suffer, or even die, once these mandates take place.

One U.S. Senator from Tennessee commented that the “infrastructure” bill is longer than the Bible sitting on his desk — considerably longer. Nobody reads the legislation they’re passing or signing (do you think Biden has?), and nobody is expected to read it. Congress is doing far worse than merely spending like drunken sailors. They’re running up debt that would sober up the worst heroin addict. It’s incomprehensible in its insanity. Inflation continues to go up. Why? Because when the government electronically “prints” more money it does not have, the value of the currency declines. This is how all economies collapse. We’re at a very real risk not just for restoring the double-digit inflation of the Nixon-Ford-Carter years of the 70s, which followed a spending spree (nothing compared to the current one) by Congress in the 1960s; we’re already back in that territory. We’re in real danger of triggering hyperinflation, the kind of currency-busting collapse that destroyed the Weimar republic in Germany (paving the way for Hitler), or that destroyed the fairly robust economy in Venezuela more recently (paving the way for the Communism and pet-eating starvation occurring there now).

I look at all the arrogant, ignorant people who watch CNN, who vote for every Democrat they can find (AOC or Bernie Sanders for President would suit them just fine), and I think: How can otherwise fairly reasonable and intelligent people be so CLUELESS? How can they be THIS ignorant of what they have endorsed and created? They move along, whistling inside their masks, assuming their great-grandchildren will live far better off than they and their children today. How could it ever all go away? This is America! The socialist republic of America, that is. Their sense of patriotism is not liberty and freedom; their sense of patriotism is a war against facts and reality, including a delusion that socialism, which has failed everywhere it’s tried, will somehow work THIS time, in America … if we can just shut up the dissenters.

Life is not supposed to be about misery and suffering. Each of us, in our individual lives, will encounter enough challenges without the government and the culture doing everything it can to bring every one of us down, and making all of us (aside from an elite, connected minority) miserable, for the rest of our days. I hardly know what to say, at this point. It all begs for a moment of silence, as a memorial to what once was, what might have been and (today) what never had to be. In 2019, America had reached a high point. And then it killed itself — seemingly, inexplicably. The suicide is happening right before our eyes. Half of us grasp it (or at least sense it); and half of us scream that while we’re done with Trump, we have to find a way to exterminate the non-socialist, the non-mask-wearing and the unvaccinated ASAP.

Increasingly, there’s not much left to say. Most of the damage has already been inflicted. Now we await the results — most of us clueless. And, as the ship goes down, the innocent — the wealth-creating business owners, the Trump “deplorables”, the lovers of liberty and rationality, and (of course) the unvaccinated — will get all of the blame. The real perpetrators will get no blame.

At its best, there’s nothing like human nature. You get scientific breakthroughs, innovations in business and technology, amazing inventions and the United States of America. At its worst, I used to say, you get Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. Now we can add to that phrase: At its worst, you get Biden’s sinking America.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason