Sad part is that, you can basically pick any random date over the past 50 years and this headline would ring true at that time. Our debt always seems to be at an all time high.
That’s just not true. At the end of the 90s the US had a budget surplus and there was a discussion of how we were going to handle it.
Then George W. Bush enacted a big tax cut in 2001 that no one remembers because it was heavily weighted toward the top 1%. Suddenly we didn’t have a surplus problem anymore.
That wasn't necessarily Bush personally, who was never the sharpest knife in the drawer, but his strategists. The Republicans had convinced themselves that surpluses encouraged government spending so by wiping them out and "starving the beast" as they put it the resulting financial crunch would create a need to slash spending, cut social welfare, and reduce the size of government.
Actually now that it's set out like that, the strategists were just as much in la-la land as Bush was.
But they never did starve anything. Even DOGE didn't cut a significant fraction of the budget. They just eliminated a bunch of ideological enemies and quit early.
They didn't even pretend to reduce the entitlement programs that they claim to hate, but are fiercely defended by the elderly, who overwhelmingly vote for them.
Here they show the debt increasing through the 90s but by less than most other decades. I don't know if it takes into account inflation though so maybe that would have made the debt have less value. Seems like they didn't use any of the surplus to pay off the debt.
I mean, that’s how growth works. Like, if the economy normally grows, the economy is always the biggest it’s ever been. Debt’s always the highest. Human population is always the largest. Number of companies is always increasing. Amount of important economic infrastructure financed by debt is ever growing.
To be fair, I’m not saying our debt is in a good place. But just that we should expect it to always be the most it’s ever been, just like we’d always expect the economy to be the largest it’s ever been.
By itself, it doesn’t mean anything if it’s always increasing, what matters more is how quickly debt is growing and if we aren’t keeping up in how we pay it off
You don’t need to fund growth with debt necessarily- look at Norway for example. They have modest gdp growth and a net asset position. (And yes I know it’s because of their mineral wealth I’m just saying that growth doesn’t necessarily entail growing debt).
Then George W. Bush enacted a big tax cut in 2001 that no one remembers because it was heavily weighted toward the top 1%. Suddenly we didn’t have a surplus problem anymore.