The debt hit the historic milestone years earlier than expected, according to the Associated Press (AP), which explained that 2020 projections from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) did not anticipate debt reaching $34 trillion until the year 2029. Debt grew faster than anticipated after immense borrowing to stabilize the economy because of the nation’s pandemic response in 2020, which resulted in large swaths of Americans without work. The $34 trillion debt level equates to roughly $100,000 for every person in the U.S. and comes just seven months after the Senate brokered a deal to lift the nation’s debt ceiling through Jan. 1, 2025. Following the announcement by the U.S. Treasury, analysts sounded alarm bells over the danger that soaring debt could bring. “So far, Washington has been spending money as if we had unlimited resources,” Sung Won Sohn, an economics professor at Loyola Marymount University, told the AP. “But the bottom line is there is no free lunch,” he said, “and I think the outlook is pretty grim.” Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, issued a statement after the financial report was released, calling on lawmakers to enact more stringent policies to curb the nation’s debt load. “There is not a single economic reason to add to the debt at the rate we are, but sadly our political leaders are unwilling to make the changes we need to turn the fiscal situation around," said MacGuineas. “There is some good news: 2023 was actually a good year for fiscal responsibility, where we saw a net $1.3 trillion improvement in the ten-year deficit picture, largely thanks to the bipartisan Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA),” she stated. “That’s a decent down payment on the much-needed deficit reduction it will take to stem the rise in our national debt.” MacGuineas warned, however, that this year there is a risk of worsening the U.S. economic outlook with poor fiscal policymaking. “We remain hopeful that policymakers will take further measures to reduce our borrowing either by raising taxes, reducing spending, or creating a fiscal commission – or ideally by doing all of the above,” she said. In the coming weeks, congress will consider about a dozen 2024 spending bills, along with foreign aid packages for Ukraine and Israel.For the first time in history, the United States' national debt has topped $34 trillion.
