As former chairs of the House Republican and Democratic campaign committees, we understand the pressures of election year politics. Candidates tend to avoid unpleasant topics, exaggerate differences, and make promises intended to reward constituencies with new benefits or tax breaks that would seemingly improve their lives.
But underlying all of this, once the dust from the electoral battle has cleared, is the existential crisis the country faces with the growing national debt.
The Treasury Department recently announced that the U.S. gross national debt exceeds $35 trillion and continues to grow at a rapid and unsustainable rate per month.
To put this in context, the ratio of debt to Gross Domestic Product, the most reliable barometer of fiscal health, is 122 percent which is higher than all but a dozen other countries in the world, and the highest peacetime ratio in U.S. history. Moreover, the rhetoric of this year’s presidential campaigns would widen this ratio if turned into policy.
It was not long ago, when one of us retired from Congress, that the debt to GDP ratio was merely 35 percent, and that was while we were fighting wars in the Middle East. Now, we have a budget where more money is spent on interest on the national debt, paying bondholders from all over the world, than on national defense. And, because much of the U.S. debt is short term, when bonds become due, they are refinanced at even higher interest rates.
We know this won’t end well. We just don’t know when it won’t end well. It is the equivalent of a person jumping off a 100-story building and, while tumbling down to the 30th floor, saying to themselves, “so far, so good.”
This is not a partisan issue, and it demands a bipartisan solution. Generations of politicians from both parties have found it unrewarding to raise taxes or cut programs, so they take the easier path of running up the debt and passing the cost on to the next generation.
Between tax cuts, major spending increases, and recession and COVID responses, this debt now threatens the dollar as the world currency and turns the inevitable crash into a game of political musical chairs, hoping the day of reckoning will be on someone else’s watch.
To give a larger perspective, if spending for all federal agencies were zeroed out, America would still be running a deficit of several hundred billion dollars. Think of it. No money for defense, no Department of Education, no FBI, no CIA, no money for food stamps, no federal spending on cancer research — and we’re still heavily in hock, with Republicans and Democrats recommending more expenditures and tax relief.
It’s clear that voters have deprioritized the issue because good candidates respond to what they hear on the trail, and elected officials closely monitor what topics people in their respective districts care about. It drives their legislative priorities. It’s hard to remember but, in the no-too-distant past, holding the line on spending and producing a balanced budget were among those priorities.
The turn-of-the century party platforms were dueling displays of anti-debt fervor. Republicans called for a “constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget” (2000) and “the creation of a line-item veto” under which all savings from the line-item veto “would be used for deficit reduction” (2004). Not to be outdone, Democrats promised to “balance the budget every year” (2000) and “restore commonsense budget rules…like ‘Pay-As-You-Go’ rules that require the government to pay for new initiatives” (2004).
This year, staring down the barrel of a very predictable (and much worse) fiscal calamity, the word “debt” is entirely missing from the Republican platform and deficit appears once — regarding our trade deficit. The draft document released by the Democratic National Committee in July has a little more to say on the national debt, with nods to reducing the deficit. However, relief from student loan debt owed to the government gets a lot more attention than the $35 trillion the government owes others.
We’ve seen and been part of more campaigns than we can count. We’ve witnessed voters rally around an issue and make it central to a campaign. So, we urge you, whether at campaign events or by other means, to tell candidates and sitting members of Congress that they must take action to start digging us out of this hole. We hold our future, and those of our children and grandchildren, in the balance.
Cheri Bustos represented Illinois’s 17th District from 2013 to 2023. She was chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee from 2019-2021. Tom Davis represented Virginia’s 11th District from 1995-2008. He was chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee from 1998 to 2002.