The Ticking Debt Clock

The latest CBO report shows the national debt is skyrocketing—and projected to only get worse.

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Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

  • A coalition government in Pakistan was formed on Tuesday, after elections last week failed to give one party a ruling majority. The parties that received the second- and third-most votes—the Pakistan Muslim League (PMLN) and Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), respectively—will support consensus choice Shehbaz Sharif, the brother of PMLN candidate and three-time former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. “Forget and forgive; forgive and forget—come let’s join hands for the betterment of the country,” Shehbaz Sharif said yesterday, hoping to move Pakistan beyond protests that erupted over the weekend over charges of a rigged election. The coalition will not include representation from independent candidates aligned with jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, which won the most seats in the election. Khan said yesterday that PTI-aligned members will not sit with either party.
  • In the chamber’s second attempt to do so in recent days, the House of Representatives voted 214-213 on Tuesday evening to impeach Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, marking the first time a Cabinet secretary has been impeached since 1876. Three Republicans—Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado, Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, and Rep. Tom McClintock of California—once again joined with all Democrats to vote against impeachment, but Majority Leader Steve Scalise returned from cancer treatment Tuesday morning to cast the deciding vote. “There are two primary grounds justifying this historic act by Congress. First, Mr. Mayorkas willfully refused to comply with the law, blatantly disregarding numerous provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act,” Rep. Mark Green, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, wrote in an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal last night. “Second, Mr. Mayorkas breached the public trust, both by violating his statutory duty to control the border and by knowingly making false statements to Congress.” The articles of impeachment will next be delivered to the Senate, where Mayorkas will stand trial and is unlikely to be convicted by a Democratic majority. “History will not look kindly on House Republicans for their blatant act of unconstitutional partisanship that has targeted an honorable public servant in order to play petty political games,” President Joe Biden said in a statement released last night.
  • The Supreme Court on Tuesday gave special counsel Jack Smith one week to respond to former President Donald Trump’s emergency request to pause the case regarding his attempts to overturn the 2020 election while his legal team appeals the claim that he is immune from criminal charges. A three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals last week unanimously rejected Trump’s argument that he cannot be charged in relation to his actions on January 6, 2021, because of his presidential immunity.
  • The Consumer Price Index rose 0.3 percent month-over-month and 3.1 percent annually in January, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Tuesday, up from 0.2 percent and down from 3.4 percent in December, respectively—and slightly above economists’ expectations. High housing costs were one of the largest factors in the report, and stocks tumbled yesterday as the data seemed to increase the odds that the Federal Reserve will hold interest rates steady at its meeting next month rather than beginning to lower them.
  • Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was released from Walter Reed Military Medical Center on Tuesday, resuming duties remotely as he recovers at home. Austin entered the hospital on February 11 after experiencing “discomfort and concern from a bladder issue related to his December 2023 prostate cancer surgery,” according to a statement released by his doctors, who noted that the bladder issue should have “no effect on his excellent cancer prognosis.”
  • Former Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi was projected to win a special election in New York on Tuesday night, defeating Republican Mazi Pilip by approximately 8 percentage points to flip the seat of former GOP Rep. George Santos following his expulsion. The victory will further narrow Republicans’ slim majority in the House for the remainder of the year. In another special election last night, Pennsylvania Democrats were able to maintain their slim majority in the state House after winning an open seat in the 140th state House District, which includes the northern Philadelphia suburbs of Bucks County.

Where Have All the Deficit Hawks Gone?

(via Getty Images)

“We just heard, about an hour ago, that our government eclipsed the $16 trillion amount in our national debt,” then-vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan told supporters at an Iowa campaign stop in September 2012. “This is a serious threat to our economy.” Ryan’s running mate, Mitt Romney, made federal spending and debt one of his campaign’s central issues—even delivering stump speeches with a running national debt clock on stage behind him while he spoke.

Looking back, 2012 may have been the high-water mark for political interest in addressing America’s debt. A dozen years later, that $16 trillion has ballooned to more than $34 trillion, and there appears to be little appetite in either party to slow that trend, let alone reverse it. But economists warn that the current fiscal trajectory—made painfully clear in last week’s Congressional Budget Office (CBO) 10-year budget and economic outlook—could soon begin imposing the economic costs that the deficit hawks of yesteryear warned of.  

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  1. BDM

    LUK: No. Policymakers will not get serious until the debt crisis starts causing deep economic pain to the population. That is because the population (voters) aren't serious about the debt crisis and have consistently punished any prominent politician brave (or stupid) enough to talk about policy fixes.

    In addition, John Bolton's comments to Politico are 100% correct. It's in the U.S.'s best interests to lead alliances. In doing so, not only do we protect our own economy and a world order that has been extremely beneficial to America for a century, but we also influence our allies to act in ways that are in our interests when they wouldn't have otherwise. The U.S. monetary investment in NATO has paid for itself many times over. It's hard to imagine a better investment in American security than NATO has been. And while not nearly so good an investment as NATO, this goes for the much more useless UN, as well. Controlling (or at least managing) the direction of that institution is largely worth the financial contributions. Of course to the MAGA crowd, these beliefs make me a "neocon" - a label I've decided to embrace - and/or a "globalist," which is such an empty descriptor in this age that it is useless as anything other than head-in-the-sand (or rectum) isolationist buffoonery.

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    2sequoia

    It will take a Democratic president to get a grip on the deficit just like it will take a Republican to take seriously our contribution to global weather change. The nation will follow a strong leader on entitlement reform, but that strong leader hasn’t materialized yet.

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    Phil

    It would take a lot of leadership and time to develop a consensus to actually do something that would make a difference. I don't see that happening anytime soon. Everyone wants the other guy to make the sacrifice and not themselves.

    I assume it will be like bankruptcy, slow and then all of a sudden. Once a panic starts nothing will stop it. Of course, the debt is just one calamity coming our way along with probably a civil war, World War Three, the effects of global warming, killer asteroids, Russian nukes in space and God knows what else.

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    1. Derek L

      There is one candidate committed to averting all that with a surefire plan to succeed. Have you considered SMOD 2024? :)

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    C C Writer

    QOTD: It'll take just about everything that is currently missing from how the government is run.

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  5. Pwjohns1983

    Fee for service healthcare has to go. It creates a system that prioritizes volume over quality, and leads to all kinds of fraud and waste. Capitation will have to happen. Somebody will have to set a budget and figure out how to care for people in a way that stays within that budget. Either the federal govt will have to do this, we could have block grants to each state and have it be managed on a state level, or we could have a Ryan style individual voucher system. Take your pick

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  6. MikeS

    The middle/upper-middle class needs to take one for the team. So much of what drives the deficit inures to their benefit, and those are the stickiest problems to solve.

    Before the 2017 tax cuts, it used to be mortgage interest deductibility. Why should that household expense be deductible? Because so many upwardly aspiring in the middle class valued it. Only when the 2017 tax cuts gave them a better deal with the standard deduction did the attention to this one simmer down. Similarly with state and local tax deductions. And now even the New York GOP representatives from "swing districts" want to boost the deductibility of SALT to $20k. That's a sop to upper class suburbanites who BOTH pay more than $10k in property tax AND pay enough in mortgage interest, etc., to beat the standard deduction. That requires some wealth/income.

    One of Brian Riedl's few ideas for increasing tax revenues is eliminating the deductibility of employer-provided health insurance. Of course, he proposed it before the pandemic, and I suspect he never really believed it could take hold politically, but that's exactly the kind of thing that the comfortable upper middle class needs to swallow.

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    Jonathan

    The biggest worry in a fiscal crisis (which hawks would do well to point out more often) is that they are politically destabilizing. You get much more appetite for radical politicians and policies. If a fiscal crisis is stacked on another crisis like a war, things get really unstable. Potentially revolutionary and violent. That’s far more worrisome than reducing social security to poor retirees, tragic and painful as that would be.

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  8. Jkpete46

    The "Fiscal Responsibility Act" is a nice start but moving on to the "Fiscal Stability Act"- similar to Simpson Bowles a decade ago- should not be fraught with electoral danger for passage. Obviously it would be the specific spending cuts and revenue increases resulting from the process will require the tough votes so let's get these bills passed in both the House and Senate so asking for a process should be worth the effort.

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    Ed

    LUK: When the American people think the debt issue is serious enough to discard the belief that someone else will pay for it, then the policy makers will address it, and probably effectively. Unfortunately, the belief that someone else should pay for it is nearly universal, so, in the end, everyone living will pay for it, and far too much, when some sort of collapse is imminent.

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  10. Learnin4life

    I will believe policymakers are getting serious when the first campaign promises stop being let's cut taxes. The idea that the US can grow its way out of deficits by relying on the debunked trickle down economy is ludicrous. As long as examples like Grover Norquist are involved in influencing policymakers there will never be a rational tax policy. More evidence is paraded daily in the form of defunding the IRS. So to get serious, you raise taxes, cut discretionary and defense spending and empower the IRS. Finally, rather than use the existing tax code try revising the code to exclude all the giveaways presently embedded in the existing code. Elected officials didn't get elected to become wealthy at the expense of the electorate. Their careers can be ended by people paying more attention to policy than the carnival masquerading as government that we see today.

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    1. MathewA

      While I agree that tax cuts aren't the answer currently, tax cuts can spur enough growth to pay for themselves, it just depends on the rates and the circumstances.

      And the lack of rational tax policy is largely voters fault. While they say they don't like deficits they don't want to pay higher taxes either. And they sure as shoot don't want their entitlements cuts.

      You could cut so called "discretionary" spending to zero and it wouldn't fix our spending problems.

      80% (and growing) of all spending is on SS, Medicare/Medicaid, defense and interest. And the big increases are all entitlements (and interest)

      There is no path to fiscal solvency that doesn't include big changes to SS and Medicare.

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        2sequoia

        Completely disagree that tax cuts have ever sustainably spurred enough growth to pay for themselves. There’s always that rush of a sugar high, followed by the reality that we spend too much and take in too little revenue.

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      2. Learnin4life

        I agree with your inclusion of entitlements as a key component of spending that must be addressed. I inadvertently omitted that from the list I suggested earlier.

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