The National Debt
In recent years, as spending has increased and taxes have decreased, annual budget deficits have made our total national debt spike upward at a rate not seen since World War II.
The U.S. national debt is now well above 9 trillion dollars — more than 30 thousand dollars for every person in the country. As the total debt grows, so do the interest payments. And if Congress and the White House do nothing to reign in spending, those interest payments will someday eat up the entire federal budget.
Andrew Yarrow is director of the Washington, D.C. office of the nonpartisan group Public Agenda. He advocates for bipartisan cooperation to pay down the debt. Yarrow’s new book is "Forgive Us Our Debts: The Intergenerational Dangers of Fiscal Irresponsibility."
Yarrow objects to law makers’ head-in-the-sand aversion to the growing debt as bad economic policy, but also on moral grounds.
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