Does National Debt Still Matter? America's Gamble

Fiscal hawks have been sounding the alarm about rising debt levels for decades, but their nightmare scenario of runaway inflation hasn't come to pass. How do we know if this time is different? 

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In 2010, when former White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles and former Sen. Alan Simpson (R–Wyo.) were appointed to co-chair President Obama's deficit-reduction commission, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) offered two projections on the future of American debt. One forecast saw debt ballooning, and the second was much more moderate. Current projections are somewhere in the middle.

And in the 11 years since, America has also made no meaningful structural reforms to deal with the problem. 

Congress has doled out more than $4 trillion in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The U.S. national debt held by the public is currently almost $22 trillion, or about $67,000 per citizen, surpassing the country's annual GDP for the first time since World War II. 

On the current path, the CBO predicted in March that the debt would grow to 102 percent of GDP by the end of 2021, to 107 percent by 2031, and 202 percent by 2051. It also predicted that by 2051, the federal government will be spending more than a quarter of its annual budget just to pay interest on the principal. But those estimates came before President Joe Biden signed the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill, which made the long-term budget outlook even worse.

What is the risk to the U.S. economy? Fiscal hawks have been sounding the alarm about rising debt levels for decades, but their nightmare scenario of runaway inflation hasn't come to pass. How do we know if this time is different? 

Produced by Zach Weissmueller and Justin Monticello. Graphics by Lex Villena and Isaac Reese. 

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