America’s Mounting Debt Is a National Security Threat

I learned valuable lessons running a machine shop in Kansas before entering government service.  Perhaps the most important was this: You have to balance the books.  Everything produced has a cost – whether it’s labor, materials, quality control, marketing, or more – and it is the responsibility of any competent business owner to ensure that these costs do not exceed the revenue earned by the company.  When you fail to do this, the consequences are terrible – layoffs, downsizing, and total failure all become possibilities or even imperatives.  This is a fundamental truth: No matter how big or wealthy a business may be, running deficits only leads to failure.  Our federal government has forgotten this essential truth.  We must wake up to the threat America’s mounting national debt poses to the future of our country before it is too late.

A recent report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that this year’s budget deficit will be $2 trillion – somehow $400 billion more than was forecast in February and $300 billion larger than last year’s deficit.  Our national debt was 97.3% of our national GDP last year; in ten years, the CBO now estimates that it will balloon to 122% of GDP.  We will literally have more debt as a nation than the total wealth of our economy – the largest, most dynamic and powerful in the world – is able to produce.

This amounts to almost $35 trillion.  That’s over $250,000 per American family!  The federal government is saddling future generations with unbelievable debt that will be incredibly difficult to overcome.  It carries very real and very serious consequences.  Rising debt can lead to high levels of inflation – a phenomenon we’ve already seen in the Biden Administration.  Prices as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) are up nearly 20% since Biden took office.  Coupled with inflation, rising debt also leads to persistent higher interest rates – which discourage private investment and slow economic growth – another phenomenon we’ve seen during Biden’s tenure, as Biden’s fiscal policies have led to the most rapid increase in mortgage rates in four decades.  That isn’t just a number on a spreadsheet – it means families, especially young families, all across America cannot afford to purchase a home.  Persistent high debt, interest rates, and inflation can combine to weaken the value of the U.S. dollar in the long run – a disastrous outcome that would only benefit America’s adversaries in Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran as they seek to recenter the global economy away from the United States.

Lastly, you have to at least pay the interest on the debt. This year, that interest is approaching $1 trillion.  This is more than we pay for our nation’s defense. Every new dollar of debt takes away precious resources that can be better used to keep this nation strong, or, even better, keep it in the hands of the American people.

Like an addict who won’t admit they have a problem, the Biden Administration cannot deliver a strong economy because it refuses to identify why inflation, debt, and interest rates are all rising: entitlement spending.  Biden’s student debt “forgiveness” programs will cost a combined $870 billion to $1.4 trillion.  Goldman Sachs estimated that the Inflation Reduction Act, replete with green energy subsidies and handouts, carries a total cost of $1.2 trillion.  Subsidies for the Affordable Care Act – otherwise known as Obamacare – have also skyrocketed, in part due to the Biden Administration introducing new rules allowing a large number of illegal immigrants to have access to it.  In short, entitlement spending is rising at an unsustainable pace.

The Biden Administration doesn’t seem to care.  Consider its approach to inflation: First, it claimed that inflation was transitory. When that turned out to be a lie, it said that prices were just “catching up” to pre-COVID levels. When that turned out to be a lie, it found other things to blame instead – the war in Ukraine, supply chain issues, and more.  Its focus has always been short term and utterly political, leaving our children and grandchildren to pay the bills it is racking up.  Biden’s plan to combat these rising costs is simply to raise taxes by $5 trillion, putting America’s federal tax burden above 20% of GDP – one of the highest in our nation’s history, and something that has rarely happened absent a war or major crisis.  (When factoring in state and local taxes, I suspect this is one of the highest rates in the industrialized world.)

A national debt crisis need not be our destiny, though – there are ample avenues to cutting entitlement spending without even touching things like Social Security.  Canceling unconstitutional programs, like Biden’s student loan relief, is a good start and would be the right thing to do. After all, why should Americans who did not even attend college have to pay for those who did?  The Inflation Reduction Act should be demolished and every cent possible should be clawed back.  We should not provide immigrants who are here illegally with taxpayer-funded healthcare.  By doing these things, we can cut taxes instead of raise them and, combined with cutting regulations to allow our manufacturing and energy sectors to prosper, we can bring down inflation and interest rates, too.  These are achievable goals.  We simply need to elect leaders who are serious about our nation’s future, not just winning the next election.