Maya MacGuineas and Samuel T. Sicard: Situation Dire
Maya MacGuineas is president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and Samuel T. Sicard is president and CEO of First National Bank of Fort Smith. They recently wrote an opinion piece for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, an excerpt of which can be found below.
Eight years later, 2025 has little resemblance to President Donald Trump's first term in 2017--especially when it comes to our nation's dire fiscal situation.
The president and Congress are racing to enact their reconciliation agenda focused on tax cuts, border security, defense investment, and energy production. However, they are also contending with a national debt that is nearly the size of the entire U.S. economy--nearly 25 percentage points of GDP higher than 2017--alongside deficits that have more than doubled and interest payments on the debt nearing $1 trillion annually.
To really get a sense of the magnitude of the hole we've dug for ourselves, we can go back even further to 2001, when--fantastical as it seems today--America posted budget surpluses and was on a course to pay down the debt entirely. In the decades since, thanks to often bipartisan tax cuts and spending increases enacted by Congress and presidents from both parties, we're approaching debt levels we haven't seen since World War II.
Read the entire piece here.
Published works by members or staff of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget do not necessarily reflect the views of all members or staff of the Committee.
