America’s Fiscal Armageddon And How To Avoid It, Part 1

The 2024 election contest between Biden and Trump is farcical not just because it pits the mentally lame against the egomaniacally blind. The more compelling absurdity is that America is now hurtling headlong into an existential fiscal crisis, but neither candidate ever mentions this clear and present danger, let alone proposes even a semblance of a remedial plan.

During his recent State of the Union (SOTU) address, for instance, Joe Biden even had the nerve to brag that “I’ve already cut the federal deficit by over one trillion dollars”.

Well, actually aside from the $6 trillion of UniParty deficits he and the Donald ran-up during the pandemic stimmy bacchanalia of 2020-2021, the deficit of $1.7 trillion incurred in 2023 was by far the largest in American history. And yet the puppeteers who scroll the “Joe Biden” teleprompter are taking a bow for purportedly stemming the red ink?!

Federal Deficit/Surplus, 1955 to 2023

Actually, if any reality-therapy is needed on the banks of the Potomac, the March release of CBO’s latest long-term budget outlook should do the job. It is based on a bunch of Rosy Scenario assumptions where there are no recessions, no inflation flare-ups, no interest rate spikes, no financial crises, no big wars, no global energy crises—-just good economic sailing for the next 30 years!

Then again, where they end up is positively horrifying, even if the Rosy Scenario underlying the report is utterly incompatible with the fiscal disaster it projects. Accordingly, the real debt numbers are sure to be a lot worse as the future unfolds.

Still, CBO’s optimistic projections show the publicly-held debt hits 166% of GDP by 2054, which towers far above even the WWII peak of 106%. And back then there was a plenitude of Treasury bond buyers owing to the 24% of GDP national saving rate generated by an economy fully mobilized for war and which was subject to such harsh rationing that there were few consumer goods to buy.

Not suprisingly, therefore, the payrollers at the Congressional Budget Office were discreet enough to present this dismal story in the “percent of GDP” metric because the actual numbers stated in greenbacks are literally coronary-producing. The blue line below translates to $140 trillion of public debt in 2054.

Apparently, the Capitol Hill staffers who penned the report don’t wish to have some yokel Congressman from Kansas doing his own math with a hand calculator. That’s because at the 3.8% blended average interest rate the US Treasury is projected to be paying at the end of this 30-year period, annual Federal interest expenditures would amount to $5.3 trillion per year!