When you put together everything Americans produce in a year, it adds up to some $16 trillion — an almost unimaginable amount of money. Now for the first time in its history, the United States owes its creditors that same amount.
The $16 trillion of federal debt is as big as the nation’s entire economic output for a year. In other words, if each dollar the U.S. produced for an entire year went to the federal debt, it would just barely pay it off.
Not since the height of World War II, when the debt exceeded 120 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP), has the nation been this much in the hole.
Danger Ahead
Fiscal hawk Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., sees great danger ahead.
“The consequences are grave moving forward,” he told CBN News. “Because not only is the debt high, but according to the Congressional Budget Office and all the experts who are looking at it, there’s no plan in place to change that any time in the near future.”
“It’s debt as far as the eye can see,” he said.
Phil Kerpen is a conservative economic analyst at Americans for Prosperity and author of the book Democracy Denied.
He pointed out there’s little reason to think a country’s GDP and its debt would have anything to do with each other. But he said research shows they do.
“When countries get above 100 percent of GDP, they have real difficulty financing their debt, and it tends to precipitate major fiscal challenges,” Kerpen told CBN News.
Rubio puts some of the blame for the persistent hard economic times on the debt.
“The existence of this debt without a plan to fix it is really slowing down the ability of this economy to recover,” he stated.
“And people are hurting,” he said. “Go ask them. You’ll see people are hurting. They’ve lost their jobs. They’re working twice as hard, making half as much.”
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