America’s public debt is projected to rise to record levels over the next three decades, according to a new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis, which noted that the government’s finances have improved a bit thanks to the GOP-led debt ceiling deal but overall remain “challenging.”
The new forecast, released on Wednesday by the non-partisan spending scorekeeper, extends over a 30-year period the CBO’s earlier 10-year estimate of the effects of the debt ceiling legislation that President Joe Biden signed into law on June 3.
After crunching the numbers inside the debt limit agreement, called the Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA), the CBO found that the act would reduce the cumulative deficit over the 10-year period until 2033 by about $1.5 trillion to $18.8 trillion.
That’s down from the previous projection of $20.3 trillion, with most of the decline stemming from the expectation that the FRA’s statutory caps will put a ceiling on discretionary funding in 2024 and 2025.
The CBO’s long-term projections, which extend the outlook from a 10-year to a 30-year period, describe the nation’s longer run finances as slightly better than before the FRA was passed, but still worrisome.
Federal debt is expected to rise in relation to gross domestic product (GDP), surpassing its historical high in 2029, when it reaches 107 percent of GDP. It then continues to climb, hitting 181 percent of GDP by 2053, per CBO.
“Such high and rising debt would slow economic growth, push up interest payments to foreign holders of U.S. debt, and pose significant risks to the fiscal and economic outlook,” CBO said in a statement, adding that so big of a debt burden “could also cause lawmakers to feel more constrained in their policy choices.”
The projections are based on various assumptions regarding the strength of the economy, the future path of interest rates, as well as labor market and demographic dynamics.
Red Flags
The CBO estimate indicates that federal spending as a percentage of GDP is expected to drop steadily from 24.2 percent in 2023 to 23.1 percent in 2026.
However, spending then starts to rise, reaching 29.1 percent of GDP in 2053. By comparison, the average outlays to GDP ratio between 1973 and 2022 was 21 percent.
One alarming finding in the report is that the inflation-driven high interest rate environment, along with persistently large primary deficits, are expected to cause debt-servicing interest costs relative to GDP to go up by nearly 300 percent over the next three decades.
However, the debt limit deal will result in a $188 billion decrease in net interest payments by 2033, beginning with a $1 billion drop in fiscal year 2024, according to CBO’s earlier impact assessment of the FRA.
Further, an aging population combined with growing health care costs boosts federal spending “significantly” on major health care programs and Social Security, the CBO said in the report.
Much like the spending projections, revenues are expected to fall from now until 2026, when some provisions from the Trump-era tax act are scheduled to expire.
The CBO report expects revenues to fall to 18.4 percent of GDP in 2023 and continue to decline until 17.8 percent in 2026. Revenues then gradually rise to 19.1 percent of GDP by 2053.
However, Republican leaders have said they hope to extend the 2017 tax cuts, which could squeeze what the CBO said in the more detailed version of its report (pdf) is a “significant source” of government revenue.
The CBO report warns that if the federal debt continues to rise in relation to GDP at the projected rate, there “would be an elevated risk of a fiscal crisis” in which investors lose confidence in the U.S. government’s ability to repay its debt and make interest payments. This, in turn, could cause interest rates to “increase abruptly, inflation to spiral upward, or other disruptions to occur,” CBO warned.
Other adverse effects would be possible too; like if expectations about the future rates of inflation push higher, the U.S. dollar’s role as the dominant international reserve currency could be undermined.
“Concerns about the government’s fiscal position could lead to a sudden and potentially spiraling increase in people’s expectations for inflation, a large drop in the value of the dollar, or a loss of confidence in the government’s ability or commitment to repay its debt in full, all of which would make a fiscal crisis more likely,” the report states.
There are other factors beside the amount of federal debt that feed into the risk of a fiscal crisis, and CBO said it’s unable to identify a tipping point at which the debt-to-GDP ratio would be so high that it makes a crisis likely or imminent.
However, it assessed the near-term risk of a fiscal crisis as low.
Meanwhile, the national debt surpassed $32 trillion for the first time in U.S. history when the Treasury Department released data on June 17—and the debt has gone up since.
The national debt as of June 27 stood at an all-time high of $32.18 trillion, according to the Treasury’s daily statement (pdf).
This represents about $25 trillion in debt held by the public, and about $7 trillion in intragovernmental debt (pdf).
One provision of the FRA suspends the debt ceiling for 19 months, which means the government can continue to borrow money until the end of 2024.
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.