Chicago – September 25, 2024
Once upon a time, the United States’s ballooning national debt was a major talking point of presidential elections.
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s final debate in 2016 featured a dedicated 12-minute segment on the topic.
Barack Obama and Mitt Romney clashed on the issue during all three of their debates in 2012.
Fast-forward to 2024 and, apparently, the national debt is not important any more.
The word “debt” did not come up once during Trump and Kamala Harris’s first, and so far only, debate earlier this month.
The Republican Party, traditionally most eager to claim the mantle of fiscal responsibility, did not include a single reference to the debt or the deficit in its 16-page platform document released in July.
It is not as though the debt is any less relevant today than it was during recent elections – quite the opposite.
In 2012, the national debt, excluding money owed by the government to itself, stood at $11.4 trillion, about 69.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).
Today, it stands at about $28 trillion, or about 99 percent of GDP.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that the figure will top $51 trillion in the next decade to take the debt-to-GDP ratio to 122 percent – higher than in the aftermath of World War II.
Neither Trump nor Harris has paid much attention to this ticking time bomb, much less put forward serious proposals to defuse it.
In fact, both candidates’ policies are set to make the situation much worse.
While grandiose promises by politicians are not new, Trump and Harris have rolled out so many costly pledges – from Trump’s promise to extend his 2017 tax cuts and exempt overtime from taxes, to Harris’s plan for $25,000 in assistance for first-time homebuyers – that independent budget forecasters have struggled to keep up.
