| > I do know that under Democrats and Republicans, the debt keeps rising In fact it is not. Looking at debt/GDP ratio: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S ...the trend has indeed been broadly upwards since the 80's, but mostly due to shocks in 2009 (QE and the aftermath of the financial meltdown) and 2020 (covid). Other than those, it tends to actually be pretty flat. And in fact has been dropping during the covid recovery, about as quickly as it ever has. I bet the news media you've chosen to believe on economics data didn't tell you that, did they? > I do know that hundreds of billions of dollars are spent each year on just interest payments on the US Debt and that money could be better spent in other areas. Oh good, because this is an even better FRED chart to pull out: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYOIGDA188S In fact debt interest as percent of GDP has not been growing over time. The debt is bigger now because interests are lower now. And even more interestingly, the debt service cost actually does show a big spike in history, during the Reagan expansion in the 80's, where the deficit was financed with much higher interest treasury bonds. And you can see all that debt decay back to baseline over the 20-30 year terms of the loans. It's history now, those debts are all repaid. And, it worked out fine. Were the late 80's and 90's an economic disaster brought on by unsustainable spending? Did anything bad happen at all? Most people look back on that period as one of growth and prosperity. Basically: all your intuition is wrong. |