The national debt is growing at an unprecedented pace, and almost nobody is prepared to stop it
By Richard Rubin and David Luhnow
In the run-up to Tuesday's midterm elections, Democratic ads hammer at the Iran war, gas prices and alleged corruption. Republicans warn about socialism, transgender athletes and tax hikes. What's conspicuously absent from both parties' pitches? America's soaring deficits and debt.
During the 2018 midterms, 140 political ads talked about the debt or deficit, according to ad tracking firm AdImpact. This year, just 30 did, ranking 52nd among topics in this year's campaigns.
This is not because the debt problem went away. Quite the opposite.
For the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, U.S. publicly held federal debt reached 100% of gross domestic product for the first time in 80 years. That's more than triple its 2001 level, and analysts expect the post-World War II record of 106% to fall in a few years.
The annual deficit for the year that ended Sept. 30 landed just shy of $2 trillion, or 6.2% of GDP. That's seven consecutive years above 5%, the longest such streak in at least a century and unprecedented outside wars, recessions or emergencies. Interest on the debt more than doubled in just four years and its cost now exceeds military spending.
While there is no sign of market panic yet, periodic spasms in the bond market -- including the recent jump in Treasury yields to 24-year highs -- give a hint of what's at stake.
In an extreme scenario, investors, worried that the U.S. never dials back its borrowing, or that it unleashes inflation to repay the debt with devalued dollars, demand dramatically higher interest rates. That would squeeze the economy. As mounting interest charges further widen the deficit, a debt spiral could take hold.
In a less extreme scenario, the relentless rise in interest and pension and healthcare costs for the elderly will squeeze other programs mercilessly, making it harder to find money for everything from food inspection to national parks. Social Security will become insolvent in 2032, forcing a mini reckoning. Unexpected crises will happen and Congress may lack the fiscal cushion to respond.
France could be a sign of what awaits. Its debts and deficits are in the same league as the U.S., although its economy is weaker. Attempts to curb spending have brought down four prime ministers in three years. As investors lost hope of any fix, they began dumping French bonds, sending yields soaring and slowing an already weak economy.
So what happened to Washington's fiscal hawks -- the political leaders concerned about debt and prepared to curb red ink? They hit a wall of indifference and retired, lost elections, changed the subject or became doves.
Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford tried to resurrect his political career this summer in the Republican primary for a Senate seat with ads warning that debt was reaching a "tipping point" that could crush the economy and even risk the republic.
He finished fourth.
Sanford said he thought he was making headway in explaining the connection between federal debt and household costs but acknowledges it's a hard argument. "There's a more complex political sale than, 'There's a transgender whatever walking into your bathroom,'" he said.
In the 1980s and 1990s, lawmakers believed that trying to reduce red ink could be a positive in their next campaigns, said Rep. Steny Hoyer (D., Md.), who is retiring after nearly 46 years in the House and stints as majority leader.
Those days are long gone. "Nobody asks me about the debt," Hoyer said. "I don't think they ask any other (House) members about the debt."
It's not just the U.S. Across the rich world, budget deficits are projected to average 5.2% of GDP this year, up from 2.6% a decade earlier, according to International Monetary Fund data. Gross public debt as a share of GDP stands near 110%, the highest sustained level since the Napoleonic wars in Europe in the early 1800s.
As in the U.S., foreign leaders are indifferent or paralyzed. Despite surging French bond yields, violent street protests are ramping up pressure on politicians to spend more, not less.
Britain's debt reached its highest sustained levels since the early 1960s, and bond yields are at their highest since the late 1990s. Japan is rolling out tax cuts, despite increasing yields and an enormous government debt.
Even Germany, with a culture of prudence shaped by hyperinflation and Nazism, recently loosened its debt rules to borrow more for defense.
How the Hawks Died Off
Several forces made fiscal hawks an endangered species. First, a series of crises, coupled with rising pension and medical costs for aging populations, ratcheted debts ever higher.
Second, financial markets didn't revolt against those rising debts, which robbed hawks of credibility and made prominent economists rethink the conventional wisdom on debt.
Third, freed from fear of debt and voter backlash, politicians discarded obligations to pay for their agendas of expanded government and lower taxes.
During much of U.S. history, presidents and Congresses usually borrowed only during wars or economic downturns. They went to great pains to reassure voters that those moves were temporary. But particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, American politicians started losing their sense of shame about deficits, argues Joseph Thorndike, an American historian of tax and fiscal policy.
"Once you loosen the norm a little bit, it's only a matter of time until it frays completely," he said.
The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks kicked off a series of once-a-century crises: wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the global financial crisis, the coronavirus pandemic, Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The U.S. met all of them with more borrowing and spending.
That may well have been prudent. It turned out that rich countries could borrow a lot more than many fiscally conservative economists believed without triggering the sort of crises that hit Greece and Argentina.
Britain's conservatives became for some on the left a cautionary tale in the perils of caring too much about debt. Spooked by the Greek debt crisis, they embraced austerity -- higher taxes and spending cuts -- in 2010. The Bank of England's former chief economist called it "an act of economic vandalism" that may have contributed to anxieties that led to Brexit.
After a stimulus bill early in his presidency, Barack Obama raised taxes to pay for Obamacare, and in 2011 struck a deal with Republicans to pare back spending. Many Democrats thought he should have resisted the GOP's austerity efforts even harder and kept borrowing levels higher, which might have prevented the slow growth and economic anxiety that helped bring Donald Trump to power.
As debts rose in the 2010s, fiscal hawks warned of an impending crisis. But it never materialized, in great part because central banks kept interest rates near zero and bought government bonds.
The case against austerity got support from prominent economists like Larry Summers, who argued the U.S. faced "secular stagnation" and should boost demand through government spending.
Olivier Blanchard, the IMF's former chief economist, gave a talk to the American Economic Association in 2019 arguing that rich countries were underestimating how much debt they could carry, so long as interest rates (r) remained below the rate of nominal economic growth (g).
Blanchard now says he went too far. "The very low rates -- the negative r-g for a long time -- probably created a false sense of security. I have to plead guilty here," he said. "I thought secular stagnation would be, if not secular, at least longer-lasting than it turned out to be."
By the time economists changed their tune, politicians weren't listening. Fearful of repeating their Obama-era slow recovery, Democrats went big in early 2021, pushing through a $1.9 trillion law that contributed to the postpandemic inflation spike. In 2025, Republicans took power and cut spending -- and cut taxes even more.
Jürgen Stark, a former chief economist at the European Central Bank, said central bankers' long period of ultralow interest rates, government bond buying and, in Europe, transformation into lenders of last resort, have taught politicians and the public that fiscal imprudence has no consequences. "Once the bad lessons are learned, they're impossible to unlearn," he said.
Fiscal Doves Take Control
U.S. government spending has risen above 23% of GDP now from about 18% in the 1960s. Revenues fluctuate but now are largely the same, around 17%. The upshot: It was easier to increase spending than the taxes needed to pay for it. Debt filled the gap, and politicians and voters on the left and right had their cake and ate it too: more spending and lower taxes.
A budget deal with Democrats that hiked taxes helped cost President George H.W. Bush re-election in 1992 and splintered the GOP. Republicans then adopted a "no net tax increases, ever" posture. They still cared about deficits but cared more about keeping taxes low and reducing them further. When Republicans pressed to curb programs for the elderly that threatened to consume future budgets, they paid a political price. Democrats built attack ads out of George W. Bush's 2005 plan for partially private Social Security accounts and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's 2012 pledge to rein in Medicare.
In his 2016 campaign, Trump hit on a solution. He simply mirrored the Democratic position and said he would oppose any cuts to Social Security or Medicare, the government's largest programs. Both barely merited discussion in the past three presidential campaigns, because there was little if any daylight between the candidates.
Trump's rise signaled the end of the Republican party's Reagan-era fiscal consensus, said Paul Ryan, who was Romney's vice presidential running mate in 2012 and House speaker during Trump's first term.