Not too long ago, the national debt pushed above $30 trillion. Today, Uncle Sam is $30.26 trillion in the red. And he’s on the fast track toward $31 trillion.
Today, most people don’t bat an eye at the national debt. But that wasn’t always the case. As David Stockman pointed out there was a great deal of concern about the national debt when he was President Ronald Regan’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget.
With little fanfare, the national debt crossed the $30 trillion threshold this week. That is an unfathomable number. And as host Mike Maharrey explains in this week’s Friday Gold Wrap podcast, it’s worse than that. Most people aren’t concerned. Maharrey argues that they should be, likening the federal government’s borrow and spend policy to a monetary Jenga game.
The national debt quietly pushed past $30 trillion on Jan. 31. But that is only the tip of the debt iceberg. The American taxpayer is on the hook for a lot more than that. In his podcast, Peter Schiff said US government borrowing and spending has turned the dollar into monopoly money propped up by a massive Ponzi Scheme.
On January 31, the national debt quietly eclipsed $30 trillion.
The US government has run up debt at breakneck speed after raising the debt ceiling. The national debt broke through $29 trillion on Dec. 16. It took just 46 days for Uncle Sam to add another $1 trillion to his massive pile of debt. It took less than five years for the national debt to grow from $20 trillion to $30 trillion.
Despite a monthly record in receipts to the US Treasury, the federal government still managed to run a deficit in December. That’s because the federal government also broke a monthly spending record.
President Joe Biden’s “build back better” spending bill seems to be dead — at least for the time being. But there is still plenty of spending coming down the pike. This raises an important question: how is the Federal Reserve going to simultaneously taper its bond-buying program and monetize all of this debt?
On Monday, President Joe Biden signed a massive military spending bill into law.
Even with the federal government ostensibly trying to limit spending with its head against the debt ceiling, it managed to run another massive deficit in November.
The budget shortfall last month was $191.34 billion, according to the latest Treasury Department statement. That was 31.7% higher than the November 2021 deficit.
The US government started fiscal 2022 the same way it ended fiscal 2021 — spending itself into a massive budget shortfall.
The budget deficit for October came in at $165.1 billion, according to the most recent monthly Treasury statement.
The federal budget deficit for fiscal 2021 came in at $2.77 trillion. It was the second-largest deficit in US history, just behind last year’s $3.13 trillion shortfall. Despite falling shy of the deficit record, Uncle Sam spent even more money in 2021 than it did during the depths of the 2020 coronavirus recession.
We have a temporary truce in the debt ceiling fight. On Thursday, President Biden signed a bill increasing the federal debt limit by $480 billion. But this isn’t an end to the debt ceiling fight. Congress just kicked the can down the road. The increase is only expected to keep the US government solvent until Dec. 3.
As Peter Schiff explained in this clip from his podcast, the debt ceiling has turned into a debt floor.
