Taxpayer Alert: You're Now Liable for $34.8 Trillion!

The national debt — which measures what the U.S. owes its creditors — rose to $34,852,201,287,595.04 as of Monday afternoon, according to the latest numbers published by the Treasury Department. That is up about $4.6 billion from the figure reported the previous day.

By comparison, just four decades ago, the national debt hovered around $907 billion.

The outlook for the federal debt level is bleak, with economists increasingly sounding the alarm over the torrid pace of spending by Congress and the White House. Interest payments on the debt for the government's fiscal year, which begins in October, now exceed the costs of Medicare and the defense budget. 

The latest findings from the Congressional Budget Office indicate that the national debt will grow to an astonishing $54 trillion in the next decade, the result of an aging population and fishing federal health care costs. Higher interest rates are also compounding the pain of higher debt.

Should that debt materialize, it could risk America's economic standing in the world.

"America’s fiscal outlook is more dangerous and daunting than ever, threatening our economy and the next generation," said Michael Peterson, the CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation that advocates for reducing the federal deficit. "This is not the future any of us want, and it’s no way to run a great nation like ours."

The unrelenting increase is what prompted Fitch Ratings to issue a surprise downgrade of the nation's long-term credit score in mid-2023. The agency cut the U.S. debt by one notch, snatching away its pristine AAA rating in exchange for an AA+ grade. In making the decision, Fitch cited alarm over the country's deteriorating finances and expressed concerns over the government's ability to address the ballooning debt burden amid sharp political divisions. 

"This is a warning shot across the U.S. government's bow that it needs to right its fiscal ship," Sean Snaith, an economist at the University of Central Florida, told FOX Business. "You can't just spend trillions of dollars more than you have in revenue every year and expect no ill consequences."

The spike in the national debt follows a burst of spending by President Biden and Democratic lawmakers. 

As of September 2022, Biden had already approved roughly $4.8 trillion in borrowing, including $1.85 trillion for a COVID relief measure dubbed the American Rescue Plan and $370 billion for the bipartisan infrastructure bill, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a group that advocates for reducing the deficit.

While that is about half of the $7.5 trillion that former President Donald Trump added to the deficit while he was in office, it's far more than the $2.5 trillion Trump had approved at that same point during his term. 

Biden has repeatedly defended the spending by his administration and boasted about cutting the deficit by $1.7 trillion. 

"I might note parenthetically: In my first two years, I reduced the debt by $1.7 trillion. No President has ever done that," Biden said recently. 

The White House has also tried to blame Republicans for the astronomical rise in debt in recent years.

"This is the trickle-down debt — driven overwhelmingly by repeated Republican giveaways skewed to big corporations and the wealthy," Michael Kikukawa, White House assistant press secretary, said in a statement provided to FOX Business after the debt surpassed $34 trillion.

Even more worrisome is that the spike in interest rates over the past year and a half has made the cost of servicing the national debt more expensive.