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Posted on 05/02/2026 6:13:32 AM PDT by Twotone
The U.S. national debt exceeded the total amount of output from the entire economy as of March 31, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
The country’s publicly held debt was $31.265 trillion, while the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the total value of goods and services in the economy, was $31.215 trillion. The ratio of GDP to Debt was 100.2%, up from 99.5% in September 2025, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The government now spends $1.33 for every dollar it collets in revenue, with budget deficits running consistently at around 6% of GDP. That figure will continue to rise unless drastic spending reductions are made — which seems unlikely given the lack of serious budget cut proposals making their way through Congress.
Unfunded liabilities including Social Security and Medicare will increase as baby boomers continue to retire, further straining the federal budget. These mandatory spending programs account for approximately 50% of federal spending. Future unfunded liabilities could total as much as $193 trillion, according to a March report from Open the Books.
In 2027, the Congressional Budget Office projects that mandatory spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, plus interest on the debt, will permanently exceed federal tax revenue, according to a Boyd Institute report. That means every dollar of discretionary spending on programs ranging from defense to research to federal agencies will be completely financed using borrowed money, according to the report.
A decline in the U.S. labor force participation rate is expected to further strain the already bloated federal budget, with the rate dropping to its lowest level since 1977 in March, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The U.S. already spends more on interest payments on the debt than it does on defense spending, according to the Boyd Institute report. This issue will be exacerbated if interest payments the government pays to its debt holders increase.
Profligate government spending prompted former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to warn on April 16 that the federal government needed to craft an emergency plan to address a potential crisis in the market for U.S. Treasury bonds — which investors buy and are used to fund the government’s spending deluge.
Paulson warned that as the federal government continues to rack up more debt, investors will demand higher interest rate yields to compensate them for taking on the risk of purchasing Treasury notes as the likelihood that the government can make all its payments on time declines. This in turn would cause the interest the federal government pays to finance its debt to rise, thus making insolvency more likely, a term economists have termed a “doom loop.”
“We need an emergency break-the-glass plan which is targeted and short term on the shelf, so it’s ready to go when we hit the wall,” Paulson told Bloomberg during its Wall Street Week event. “When you hit the wall and you’re trying to issue Treasurys, and the Fed is the only buyer and the prices of the Treasurys are down and interest rates are up, that’s a dangerous thing.”
JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon also warned of a looming bond crisis caused in large part by the government spending deluge during a Tuesday investor’s event in Norway. “The way it’s going now, there will be some kind of bond crisis, and then we’ll have to deal with it, Dimon said.
“I just think maturity should say you should deal with it, as opposed to let it happen,” Dimon added, according to CNBC.
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Now there is something we can proud of. /sar
The US debt is a monumental failure of the political process and an example of political small-mindedness. It can’t be attributed to one or two issues. It has built up over so many decades that the issues that have contributed to it have come and gone over the years. The Democrats are mostly to blame but Republicans deserve a lot of blame too. No president is blameless - Reagan probably did the best at trying to do something about it but his efforts were defeated. Neither Bush nor Trump did or has done much about it. The issue is structural entitlement programs and no one is going to touch reforming them.
The simple truth is that any political candidate who campaigns on a promise of fiscal responsibility is going to lose. America in 2026 is a perfect example of what happens when people build their lives around this delusional idea that they have a God-given right to enjoy a standard of living they can’t afford.
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At the same time judges stop the President from reducing the workforce or eliminating fraud.
Um, drunken sailors get cut some slack for just being plain old inebriated.
These politicians and goobermint bureaucrats have NO excuse - with eyes wide open and greed in their hearts they deliberately fleeced the People’s Treasury with no remorse, and they continue to do so to pay for the illegal voting army they let in. I could go on, and on, SAD.
lock them UP.
lock them UP.
And claw back their pensions & all the millions they made while in congress!
I am offended by that title having been a drunken sailor
Yep. I’ve said since I got out of high school in 1972 that the politicians aren’t the problem. The voters are the problem.
In a democracy, you not only get the government you want. You get the government you deserve.
And to some degree, one can thank the 17th amendment for that.
+1
Explain to me why this is a “crisis” different from the structural crisis of ending of convertibility of offshore dollars to gold in 1971.
A 1957 $1 silver certificate has spending power of less that $0.03 1964 cents. THAT is a crisis.
As far as “paying it off” - obviously that is not going to happen. You know, “Owe the bank $1000 and can’t pay, you have a problem. Owe the bank a million and can’t pay, the bank has a problem”?
The US debt is going to be repudiated. How, when, and what follows, we don’t know. But will the people elect a Congress that will throw good money after bad? Not a chance.
There will be a communist or nationalist revolution before that happens. And right now, the communists are more than willing to shed blood while the nationalists are not.
They probably were fomenting revolution.
Two basic problems. Won’t cut spending and won’t really raise taxes.
Trump is trying to create an income flow with tariffs, but even he is using the money for more spending.
Go ahead, make the minimum wage $35 or whatever they want, and a hamburger will cost $35.
A lot of tragic stupidity going on.
And a society of bums legal and illegal living on assistance watching tv all day while the price of everything just keeps going up.
“Let us never forget this fundamental truth: the State has no source of money other than money which people earn themselves. If the State wishes to spend more it can do so only by borrowing your savings or by taxing you more. It is no good thinking that someone else will pay - that ‘someone else’ is you. There is no such thing as public money; there is only taxpayers’ money.”
“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples’ money.”
both quotes: Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
(who nevertheless was able to limit government over-spending only moderately, with a net annual increase of 1.1 percent instead of actual overall reductions.... The problem is systemic rather than “merely” duplicitous politicians
So much craziness in one post.
Pronto.
Those unfairly slighted drunken sailors usually stop spending money once they run out of money.
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