U.S. National Debt Crosses USD39 Trillion
U.S. National Debt Crosses USD39 Trillion
The U.S. national debt has crossed USD39 trillion days ago. This is for the first time that the debt has touched this grey kilometer post. In late October, only five months back, it was USD38 trillion. It is “unsustainable”, according to economists. If this borrowing pattern continues, increasing the national debt another trillion – USD40 trillion — will not be a distant mark.
Citing Daily Treasury Statement, Fortune, a media outlet in the U.S., said: The grim point comes “roughly two weeks before the ten-year anniversary of President Trump’s 2016 campaign promise to eliminate the national debt within eight years. Instead, the gross national debt has roughly doubled since trump first took office – it was USD19.9 trillion in January 2017.” (https://fortune.com/2026/03/18/how-big-national-debt-39-trillion-trump-promises/)
Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s CEO Michael A Peterson told Fortune: “As America soars past $39 trillion in debt, we must recognize this alarming rate of growth and the significant financial burden we are putting on the next generation. Borrowing trillion after trillion at this rapid pace with no plan in place is the definition of unsustainable.”
The advanced bourgeois economy’s condition comes to light with this fact and observation.
The Fortune report said:
“At the current rate of growth, the Peterson Foundation projects that the debt will hit $40 trillion before this fall’s elections—another trillion-dollar jump in roughly the same compressed timeframe. Michael Peterson called the figure ‘staggering.’ The speed of accumulation has accelerated sharply: the debt added its latest trillion in what the foundation estimates is less than five months, a rate of fiscal expansion that has few modern precedents outside of wartime or acute financial crisis.”
Citing the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the Fortune report said: The long-term picture is even bleaker: CBO’s (U.S. Congressional Budget Office) extended baseline now shows debt rising to 175% of GDP over the next 30 years.
The report said:
“Almost all economists agree the trajectory is dangerous. Kent Smetters, director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model and one of the U.S.’ foremost fiscal economists, argued that the gross debt number is actually less economically meaningful than debt held by the public, which now stands at $31.3 trillion. The gross figure of $39 trillion, he explained to Fortune, is intragovernmental debt, basically ‘the left hand of government owing the right hand.’ Examples include the Social Security trust fund, and there’s no independent economic significance to this beyond its role as a political signaling device. Still, he added with his trademark understatement, ‘the fact that debt held by the public has now exceeded $31 trillion is not great.’
“‘The real problem,’ Smetters said, agreeing with Peterson, ‘is that we are on an upward debt path that is unsustainable.’ When you account for both explicit debt held by the public and the implicit liabilities buried in Social Security, Medicare, and other long-term obligations, Smetters’ model puts the true fiscal gap closer to $100 trillion.
“The Penn Wharton Budget Model has previously estimated that, without major policy changes, U.S. Treasury debt will become unable to roll over its accumulated obligations within roughly 20 years—a scenario that would force either explicit default on interest payments or an implicit default through inflation.”
The report cited Smetters: “Official projections ‘constantly underestimate the growth in the debt,’ creating a feedback loop in which lawmakers are lulled into false confidence by numbers their own budget office knows are too optimistic.”
Here, one finds the condition of the lawmakers – representatives of the people: “Lulled into false confidence by numbers.” Is it deceiving of one branch of government by another branch?
A much serious reality appears, as Fortune cites Smetters: “Smetters has also previously raised pointed concerns about the budgeting apparatus that is supposed to help lawmakers navigate the crisis. Under rules dating to the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act, the Congressional Budget Office is legally prohibited from projecting discretionary spending growth faster than inflation over its 10-year window—an assumption that both the CBO and outside analysts agree bears no resemblance to historical reality.”
If representatives of the public face such condition, then what and how much the public know? Is it not helping “navigate the crisis” or failing to navigate crisis while there is crisis? Is not it a question of integrity or reliability of an organ of a government? Does not it show state of a democracy – a bourgeois democracy that claims itself as champion of accountability, participation, free flow of information?
The Fortune report has more serious things to say, as it cited Peterson:
“America faces complex and critical challenges, both at home and abroad … The harder news is that in the 10 years since the last major political promise to fix this, the debt has only grown.”
“Perhaps the most alarming dimension of the crossing”, said the report, “is what it costs just to carry the debt. Net interest payments on the national debt are projected to exceed $1 trillion in fiscal year 2026 — nearly triple the $345 billion in interest the government paid in 2020, at the onset of the pandemic. In the first three months of the current fiscal year alone, net interest payments reached $270 billion, already surpassing the nation’s defense spending for the same period.”
Peterson’s statement emphasized the dogged way “that interest burden will be over the next 30 years, the government is projected to spend nearly $100 trillion on interest alone — an amount that dwarfs every major federal program”, said the Fortune. “For individual Americans, the Peterson Foundation puts the interest tab at an average of at least $47,000 per person over the next decade.”
Peterson said: “Interest is the fastest-growing ‘program’ in the federal budget.
There is, according to the Fortune report, “acute public anxiety about federal finances.” According to a Peterson Foundation survey: Nine in 10 Americans say the rising debt is driving up the cost of living and contributing to higher borrowing costs.
Another Fortune report (March 18, 2026, https://fortune.com/2026/03/18/39-trillion-national-debt-embarrassing-milestone-headed-wrong-direction/) said: “The United States’ gross national debt crossed $39 trillion” is “a grim new threshold that a prominent fiscal watchdog says reflects decades of irresponsibility from both Republicans and Democrats”.
Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), said in a statement released Wednesday (March 18, 2026): “Surpassing $39 trillion in gross debt is an embarrassing milestone that both parties [Democrats and Republicans] have helped build over decades, and neither seems particularly interested in addressing it before we hit $40 trillion.”
However, both factions of the ruling regime in the Empire do not feel embarrassment. Instead, they continue bickering with respective interests.
In the statement, MacGuineas said: “No matter what metric one chooses to examine our fiscal trajectory, we are clearly headed in the wrong direction.”
The Fortune report said: “The numbers paint a portrait of a government living far beyond its means. Annual deficits are approaching $2 trillion, and deficits as a share of the economy are running at roughly twice the 3%-of-GDP target that economists and bipartisan policymakers have long identified as a sustainable benchmark.”
MacGuineas, according to the report, alarmed: The consequences of the U.S.’ fiscal drift are already being felt — and will get worse. She said: “Higher debt exacerbates inflationary pressures, squeezes out investment in our economy, allows interest costs to dominate our defense spending, leaves us vulnerable to emergencies and geopolitical turmoil, and could even provoke a fiscal crisis.”
Despite this grim future of a financial crisis, the Empire continues on with its imperialist policies, pursues with increasing defense spending, follows regime change plans in countries, and these demand costs or payments. A major factor of tension in global politics is the Empire’s militaristic moves against countries, which bears big costs, although recently it made an exercise with finding ways to cut expenditures, and the first axe fell on firing of employees. But any single of its war ventures takes away much of the measures identified for cost cutting.
Citing a recent analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), another Fortune report (https://fortune.com/2026/03/16/debt-spiral-fiscal-crisis-national-debt-interest-growing-faster-than-gdp/) said on March 16, 2026: “The Congressional Budget Office’s latest projections show that by fiscal year 2031, the average interest rate paid on the federal debt will exceed the country’s rate of economic growth. In the dry shorthand of economists, “R will exceed G.” In plain terms, that means that the cost of borrowing will be growing faster than the economy’s ability to pay for it.”
This is a reality of an economy considered most powerful in the world. It is not a management problem. It is policy problem, and a problem with prioritizing areas. Increased military spending plays a role in increasing public debt. It was found during Reagan-reign. The financial crisis in 2008 found increase in public debt. After the end of the World War II, in 1950, public debt rose to USD 260 billion, which was more than 100% of GDP. The Empire’s Korea war did not find increase in public debt as taxation largely financed the war.
These wars are not in the interest of the tax payers of respective countries. These wars are imperialist wars and for imperial interest. These have nothing to do with people’s interest, although people bear the burden.
Marx writes:
“National debts, i.e., the alienation of the state – whether despotic, constitutional or republican – marked with its stamp the capitalistic era. The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possessions of modern peoples is their national debt.” (Capital, vol. I, Progress Publishers, Moscow, then-USSR, 1977).
In a note, while he unveils the above point, Marx refers to William Cobbett, who remarked that “in England all public institutions are designated ‘royal’, as compensation for this, … there is the ‘national’ debt.”
“Alienation of the state” that Marx mentions is a serious issue that demands serious discussion. These states are alienated from the people these machines rule, and people also are alienated from these state machines, which only functions as a machine or tool to rule and suppress the people, and only to plunder the people.
Then, Marx sarcastically adds:
“Hence, as a necessary consequence, the modern doctrine that a nation becomes the richer the more deeply it is in debt. Public credit becomes the credo of capital. And with the rise of national debt-making, want of faith in the national debt takes the place of the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which may not be forgiven.” (Ibid.)
The Empire, thus, can claim the crown of a “richer”, even “the richest” nation, although it does not matter to the “richer nation” that all benefits and profits of such a richer nation goes only to the few rich. The same is with other capitalist economies around the world irrespective of hemispheres, irrespective of rich or poor nation, which secures and serves only the dominant section(s) of respective society(ies).
Marx goes further, as he writes:
“The public debt becomes one of the most powerful levers of primitive accumulation. As with the stroke of an enchanter’s wand, it endows barren money with the power of breeding and thus turns it into capital, without the necessity of its exposing itself to the troubles and risks inseparable from its employment in industry or even in usury. The state creditors actually give nothing away, for the sum lent is transformed into public bonds, easily negotiable, which go on functioning in their hands just as so much hard cash would. But further, apart from the class of lazy annuitants thus created, and from the improvised wealth of the financiers, middlemen between the government and the nation – as also apart from the tax-farmers, merchants, private manufacturers, to whom a good part of every national loan renders the service of a capital fallen from heaven – the national debt has given rise to joint-stock companies, to dealings in negotiable effects of all kinds, and to agiotage, in a word to stock-exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy.”
This picture or activity is found in all capitalist economies, and the real character of public debt gets exposed. This picture is found in all capitalist economies across hemispheres – North and South, be it a rich country or a poor. However, the mainstream economists restrain from telling this truth, as dominating capital restrains them with chains of perks and privileges, and with threat of whips – losing perks, privileges, high positions in the state machine and within its accessories.
Here, the picture of national debt of an advanced, mature capitalist economy that emerges carries deeper implication, both for the ruled and the rulers.
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