The Public Debt Is Going Parabolic—So Forget About The High WWII Debt Ratio

The Federal debt has been recently increasing by $1 trillion every 100 days. That’s $10 billion per day, $416 million per hour.

In fact, Uncle Sam’s debt has risen by $470 billion in the first two months of this year to $34.5 trillion and is on pace to surpass $35 trillion in a little over a month, $37 trillion well before year end, and $40 trillion some time in 2025. That’s about two years ahead of the current CBO forecast.

On the current path, moreover, the public debt will reach $60 trillion by the end of the 10-year budget window. But even that depends upon CBO’s latest iteration of Rosy Scenario, which envisions no recession ever again, just 2% inflation as far as the eye can see and real interest rates of barely 1%. And that’s to saying nothing of the trillions in phony spending cuts and out-year tax increases that are built into the CBO baseline, but which the Congress will never actually allow to materialize.

So when it comes to the projection that the 2034 debt will come in at just $60 trillion, we’ll take the unders any day of the week. The fact that it will likely be much higher also means that the Washington UniParty’s prevailing fiscal policy path will lead to $100 trillion of public debt sometime in the early 2040s. And that means, in turn, that annual interest expense will then be greater than the entire Federal budget during 2019.

Needless to say, neither Trump nor Biden have said boo about this looming calamity. Sleepy Joe has even had the audacity to brag that he has reduced the Federal deficit by more than half.

Then again, the starting point for that risible proposition is the Trumpian lockdown/stimmy fueled disaster of 2020 when the deficit hit an astounding 16% of GDP. That figure represented a larger burden on the US economy than the peak WWII deficits when America was actually fighting two real vicious enemies, as opposed to Dr. Fauci’s hyped-up super-flu.

To be sure, ever since Nixon’s perfidy at Camp David, when the US dollar’s link to gold was cancelled, the public debt and its share of GDP has been trending steadily skyward. But now it is literally going parabolic.