The United States has passed a foreboding milestone: $28 trillion in national debt. In 2021, the federal debt alone is projected to be 102 percent of gross domestic product—which doesn’t include the $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan” that President Joe Biden recently signed into law. The debt-to-GDP ratio has only exceeded 102 percent twice in American history—1945 and 1946—as a result of the spending required to win World War II (103.9 percent and 106.1 percent respectively). With that victory secured, it immediately plummeted as the U.S. entered a new golden age of prosperity. However, while the American economy enjoyed an average growth rate of 3.1 percent between 1951 and 2020, the Congressional Budget Office is currently projecting that over the next three decades, that rate will fall to 1.8 percent.
This is on top of a growing solvency crisis in our nation’s most important “entitlement” programs: Social Security and Medicare.
