Young voters deserve answers on the national debt

The 2024 election cycle is conspicuously lacking any debate on how to solve the U.S. national debt crisis.

Vice President Kamala Harris has officially accepted the rules for her debate Tuesday against former President Donald Trump. But with only one presidential debate scheduled so far, and only two months left until the election, young Americans cannot afford to overlook this issue. 

For all the talk of the anticipated costs to be incurred by future generations from the consequences of climate change, more attention must be paid to the fiscal equivalent. The growing $35 trillion national debt threatens to be the gravest fiscal policy dilemma and fundamental burden that American posterity will inherit.

A thorough discussion about how to best address this crisis should be front and center in the upcoming presidential debates. Sadly, the silence on this issue is deafening. 

CNN’s Dana Bash shockingly failed to raise the issue in Harris’s first campaign interview. Nor was there a single mention of the national debt in the Democratic National Convention.

In the American golden age of the 2000s and early 2010s, it was easy to embrace the Hamiltonian theory that national debt is simply necessary for national growth. That theory is true to an extent, but there is a limit relative to the size and trends of the national and global economies.

We are now on course for a plummeting value of the U.S. dollar, complimented by rapidly expanding taxes that are able to purchase us less in terms of government services. It is an unsustainable and tragic trajectory of the commons of our shared government debt. 

Bequeathing young and future Americans a crippling national debt, while many are already buried in student debt, is not only economically impractical and short-sighted. It is an intergenerational moral failure.

Yet, much of America’s body politic has apparently stopped caring about reasonably limiting the national debt, even as the country rapidly surpasses red lines.

Instead of asking Vice President Harris about the national debt, Bash presented a question on the economic issue upon which Democrats would currently prefer to focus: inflation. 

Harris answered with the exact angle that Democrats would prefer to sell: as of July, annual inflation has finally dropped below 3 percent. If rapid inflation is like a boat taking on water, then Democrats are celebrating the flooding having almost stopped. But the glaring reality is that the hull is still filled with water from the three-year cumulative spike in prices by 20 percent. 

And even worse, the national debt crisis remains the much larger threat to the boat’s integrity.

The U.S. national debt is now 122 percent of our $28.6 trillion GDP. If left unaddressed, the ratio of U.S. national debt to gross domestic product, and the rising costs of servicing that debt, signals an impending collapse of America’s domestic economy and international preeminence. 

If runaway cumulative inflation is like water rushing into a boat’s hull, a national debt that consistently outpaces annual GDP is like the mast corroding. The national debt is now a crisis of priority in which we risk capsizing at sea.

We are entering unprecedented territory. U.S. national debt nearly reached 120 percent of GDP in 1946, at the height of World War II. It then dropped to 50 percent by 1963 and continued dipping to lows of about 31 percent. The debt-GDP ratio reached 100 percent again in 2013. Now, having reached 122 percent in 2024, a level not even reached in World War II, the country must have a tough discussion about where we are and how we will fix this. 

A handful of leading economists, prominently including Paul Krugman, advise not to worry about it. But, of course, even Krugman acknowledges the complications that can arise in this kind of context.

Economic historian Niall Ferguson has been the canary in the coalmine for years. In a recent opinion for Bloomberg, he outlined how the national debt is already having consequences on geopolitics and the effectiveness of U.S. foreign policy. He has also consistently argued that a net national debt service cost in excess of defense expenditures is a foreboding harbinger of decline. Indeed, one only needs to look back to 1991 to see the Soviet Union’s economy collapse after, in addition to other variables that are also not absent from the modern United States, failing to stay above water with their debt service costs. 

Ballooning national debt expands the cost of servicing the debt, which eats up government revenue that would be used to pay down the principal debt, and ultimately allow the government to function. Net interest payments on the national debt alone will soon rise to 25 percent of U.S. tax revenue.

The Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 was a decent step, reducing the estimated growth in national debt by 3 percent over 10 years. That means that by 2033, the debt is expected to be $45.2 trillion (115 percent of projected GDP). The bipartisan compromise was admirable. But incremental reductions like this are insufficient to solve the problem.

We cannot ignore the fundamental corrosion of America’s fiscal future that has occurred over the past ten years.

The 2024 presidential election must prioritize the freeing of young and future Americans from a public debt that is poised to sink America’s position in the world. The U.S. economy must be made sustainable.

Jeremy Etelson was a Democratic staffer in Maryland. He received a J.D. from George Washington University in 2024 and an M.Phil. in political theory and intellectual history from the University of Cambridge in 2019.