National debt crosses major new milestone

According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), the U.S. government may soon be forced to spend more annually on federal debt interest than defense or entitlement spending.

Due to negligent deficit borrowing, the federal government is currently $32 trillion in debt. Just the News reports that “interest payments in mid-2022 stood at just under $600 billion” and now threaten to surpass other hefty expenditures, including the national defense budget (“12 percent of all federal spending and nearly half of discretionary spending”) and Medicaid, SNAP, and Supplemental Security Income payments combined.

For reference, the U.S. currently allocates more for defense spending than China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, South Korea, Japan, and Ukraine combined. In 2022, the federal government spent $591.9 billion on Medicaid, $119.4 billion on SNAP, and $58.8 billion on Supplemental Security Income. Yet interest payments are expected to exceed those expenses, even as Congress makes no effort to curb its prodigious budget.

“The federal deficit is projected to roughly double this year, as bigger interest payments and lower tax receipts widen the nation’s spending imbalance despite robust overall economic growth,” The Washington Post reported.

“The deficit will basically double from 2022 to 2023,” confirmed Marc Goldwein, senior vice president of CRFB. “This should prompt a serious evaluation of federal policy going forward, though I worry it won’t.”

Economists have been baffled by the current jump in the deficit, with former economic advisor to the Obama administration, Jason Furman, calling the increase “truly stunning.”

“The fact that it is so big in one year makes you think it must be some weird freakish thing going on,” Furman said.

Boiling under the surface of an ostensibly robust economy is a serious and impending financial crisis all but ignored by Washington. As Marc Goldwin argued, it seems unlikely these reports will prompt anyone in D.C. to do anything about it—if we want to make a change—and indeed we must—it will have to come from outside the federal government.

Washington will never willingly give up its power. The only way to take it from them is with an Article V convention, through which the American people can impose fiscal restraints and other restrictions on Congress and the federal bureaucracy. To learn more, visit conventionofstates.com today and sign the petition urging your state legislator to support this constitutional solution to government spending below.