On Jan. 2, 2024, House Speaker Mike Johnson posted a warning on X.
"The national debt is the greatest threat to America's national security, and the current addiction to reckless spending cannot be sustained," he said. "Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have a responsibility to reduce spending and finally put America on a path towards fiscal sanity."
That day, the federal debt was $33,990,127,522,066.83.
A year later, on Jan. 2, 2025, it was $36,169,957,618,760.21 -- marking a one-year increase of more than $2 trillion. Since then, the debt has been artificially restrained because Congress has not lifted the statutory limit on it. Thus, to fund the ongoing federal deficit spending, the Treasury is taking what it calls "extraordinary measures." These "measures are actions the Treasury Secretary uses to delay a binding debt limit," explains the Congressional Research Service. "These measures have been regularly invoked in recent years."
"Recently, these measures have included suspension of debt issuances to certain federal retirement accounts and for state and local government securities," says CRS. "Once lawmakers raise or suspend the debt limit and extraordinary measures end, Treasury must compensate any impacted federal accounts for their lost savings."
In other words, even though the legal limit on the federal debt has been reached, the federal government is still, in reality, borrowing money.
Speaking at a conference in Washington, D.C., on April 30, Speaker Johnson reiterated his argument that the debt is the greatest threat to America.
"Under President Biden, we crossed the dangerous threshold of $35 trillion in national debt," Johnson said. "This is a dire situation. I know the people in this room understand it. A lot of people back home don't have a full scope of the threat that this is. When we bring in leaders from the Pentagon or the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the last several years -- I served on the House Armed Services Committee, among other assignments -- we would ask them: 'What is the greatest national threat to our country? What is our top national security concern?' And you would expect them to say China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. They don't. They say the debt. And it's true that our interest payments alone are on track to outpace our entire defense spending. It's not a sustainable situation, and everybody knows that. Our adversaries know it as well."
In fact, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement, the federal government spent $874 billion on national defense in fiscal 2024 (which ended last September) and $882 billion on net interest. While doing this, it collected approximately $4.919 trillion in taxes, while spending roughly $6.752 trillion and running a deficit of approximately $1.833 trillion.
In March, the Congressional Budget Office published its annual report on the federal government's long-term budget outlook based on federal laws as they stood in January. The forecast was bleak.
"In CBO's projections, federal debt held by the public, measured as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), increases in every year of the 2025-2055 period," said the report. "By 2029, that debt climbs to 107 percent of GDP, exceeding the historical peak it reached immediately after World War II."
This is despite the fact that, under current law, Americans would be subject to higher taxes.
"Total revenues grow by 2.2 percent of GDP from 2025 to 2055," said the report. "Receipts from individual income taxes account for nearly all of that growth because increases in real income (income that is adjusted to remove the effects of changes in prices) mean that a larger share of income becomes subject to higher tax rates."
What would be the consequences of the ever-growing federal debt?
"That large and growing debt has significant economic and financial consequences," says the CBO. "Over time, it slows economic growth, drives up interest payments to foreign holders of U.S. debt, makes the nation's fiscal position more vulnerable to an increase in interest rates, heightens the risk of a fiscal crisis, and increases the likelihood of other adverse outcomes."
As of this March, according to the Treasury Department, foreign entities owned more than $9 trillion in U.S. government debt.
Entities in Japan owned $1.1308 trillion in U.S government debt. They were followed by entities in the United Kingdom ($779.3 billion) and mainland China ($765.4 billion). Entities in Hong Kong owned an additional $262.9 billion in U.S. government debt.
According to the 2020 Census, there were 73,106,000 individuals in the United States that year under 18 years of age.
The $36,169,957,618,760.21 in debt our federal government had accumulated as of the beginning of this year equals $494,760.45 for each one of those young people.
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the median sales price of a house sold in the United States in the first quarter of this year was $416,900.
That means the federal debt per American who was under 18 in 2020 is already greater than the median sales price of a home.
That is not the American dream. It is a nightmare we are handing down to our children and grandchildren.
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