US national debt surpasses $35 trillion for first time

Washington: The US federal government’s total public debt has surpassed $35 trillion for the first time, again sparking concerns about the nation’s escalating debt problem and its implications for the US economy.

The total public debt outstanding climbed to $ 35 trillion on Friday, according to the newly released Daily Treasury Statement released by the Treasury Department Monday. The data is updated at the end of each business day with data from the previous business day, Xinhua news agency reported.

Just seven months ago, the US national debt surpassed $ 34 trillion in late December 2023. Three months before that, the United States reached a historic milestone by passing $ 33 trillion.

“The borrowing just keeps marching along, reckless and unyielding,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, in a statement. “Yet despite all the risks and warning signs, these alarm bells seem to be falling on deaf ears.”

“We are going to have to get serious about the debt, and soon. Election years cannot be an exception for trying to prevent completely foreseeable dangers — and the debt is one of the major dangers we are facing,” said MacGuineas.

According to the Peter G Peterson Foundation, a nonpartisan organisation focused on addressing US long-term fiscal challenges, the national debt of $35.001 trillion translates to nearly $104,000 of debt per person in the United States.

“Our deficits are caused mainly by predictable structural factors: our ageing baby-boom generation, rising healthcare costs, and a tax system that does not bring in enough money to pay for what the government has promised its citizens,” the foundation said.

Desmond Lachman, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former official at the International Monetary Fund, told Xinhua earlier that “there can be no question that the US budget deficit is on an unsustainable path.”

The “dangerous trajectory” poses “serious questions for the dollar” and inflation’s long-run outlook, Lachman said.

Analysts have joined the chorus of voicing serious concerns about the US debt problem. Economist E J Antoni, a research fellow of the Heritage Foundation, reports that based on the Fed’s June numbers, interest on the national debt is the equivalent of 76 per cent of all personal income taxes collected by the government.

“America is going bankrupt btw,” American billionaire Elon Musk wrote in a recent post on the social media platform X.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink told media: “This is my message not just to the US but to every country right now, We have rising deficits, no one is spending enough time talking about deficits, the US deficits are the largest in the world — growing at the fastest rate in the world — and we need to be finding ways to minimise the role of the deficit on the economy, on interest rates, on inflation.”

IANS