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a sobering milestone for both the next Congress and whoever wins the presidency in November."

yeah except whenever a conservative wins the office, talk of the debt goes out the fucking window so they can lower corporate taxes.

the debt only seems to matter if we want to help human beings by raising taxes and lowering production of human killing devices/services

OBVIOUSLY if we spend LESS on US and more on Billionaires we can Balance that Budget!

The Center Square, formerly Watchdog.org, is a conservative American news website that features reporting on state and local governments.[1][2] It is a project of the Franklin News Foundation, a conservative online news organization.[1][3] The Center Square distributes its content through a newswire service.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Center_Square

Remember when Dick Cheney said deficits don't matter? I sure do.

In fiscal year 2024, the U.S. government spent nearly $900 billion on interest on the debt alone.

"That's more than we spent on national defense, Medicare, and children at the federal level – just a truly astounding figure," MacGuineas said. "The national debt is on track to reach a record share of the economy in just two years, a sobering milestone for both the next Congress and whoever wins the presidency in November."

Insanity

Federal Reserve Economic Data shows debt:GDP holding at 120% since spiking during the pandemic.

This is actually great news. The national debt went down last year. I mean, just based on those headline numbers, the national debt is smaller than it was before.

The nominal debt grew by 5% according to those numbers. Meanwhile, in that same period, US GDP nominal GDP grew at about 6% over the last year.

The raw number for national debt is meaningless. Only brain-dead morons care give a single fuck about the raw number. The raw number is for illiterate yokels who are scared of big maths in the way a caveman is scared of "fire! hot!"

For those who aren't brain-dead hicks, the only figure that matters is national debt as a share of GDP. That shows whether our debt load is increasing or decreasing in proportion to our economy. And over the last year, the value of the debt as a share of GDP went DOWN. We could sustain a $1.8 trillion deficit literally forever.

Deficit spending puts more money in the economy than it takes out, too bad most of it is going to the already wealthy

Remember when it was 7 trillion? Pepperidge farm remembers

The way the fed lends money to the US we will mathmatecially always have more debt than we have currency. What happens to this system when growth functionally stops since our planet has a finite number of resourcs? We need something better relatively soon or we're going to chase the dragon off a cliff.

Every year the Treasury issues bonds in the amount of the trade deficit to balance out the goods and services exported vs imported. Those bonds are debt that the federal government owes. The money received for the bonds is accounted for but is essentially deleted from the economy... The federal government creates money when it spends, it does not need the money it collects from bonds. We could stop creating this debt every year but they believe that balancing out imported vs exported is important for some reason.

Who are they in debt to and who are they paying interest to?

Um... 2024 isn't over yet is it?