The Growing U.S. Public Debt

Based on successive annual projections by the CBO (Congressional Budget Office), Veronique de Rugy at the George Mason Mercatus Center offers the following graphic in support of the view that, if someone doesn’t do something soon, the U.S. debt situation will spin further out of control later in the decade .

Note that it’s not just the numerator in the debt-to-GDP ratio that is causing the curves to move sharply higher since, back in 2007, CBO economists surely weren’t thinking that the U.S. would turn in the kind of growth rates that we’ve seen in recent years, namely, less than half a percent annual increase in GDP from 2008 to 2012. Of course, if you include all those IOUs that the Treasury Department has written over the years and handed to the Social Security Administration, the chart above would look much worse.