The last time an administration engineered a budget surplus, voters soundly rejected a continuation of that regime in favor of an 8-year spending binge. A substantial number of voters are planning on voting this fall for the candidate whose economic policy has contributed the most to the current debt.
Generally, looking at the last 30 years or so, it is evident that voters do not care about this issue very much.
I am going to argue slightly on your wording although I fully acknowledge the numbers do line up with your timeline.
RE the budget surplus, the dotcom boom led to a large increase in taxes collected which collapsed from 2000 to 2003. Similarly countries naturally spend more when their population is either skewing old or skewing young. The US hit peak working-age demographics during the period you are describing. The outcome doesn't seem to be "engineered" so much as accidental. In fact taxes on balance were cut during this timeframe while significant contributors to the long term debt / future crisis were unleashed (glass steagall repeal which arguably led to the great financial crisis & federal loans for eduction were dramatically expanded without oversight to ensure the money was being well spent).
Similarly, the covid response caused an explosion in the budget deficit which I wouldn't blame squarely on "a candidate's economic policy". The 2023 deficit in real dollars and as a % of GDP the largest (by a fair amount!) outside of a war, economic crisis, or the covid response. This doesn't even count the ~400? billion in student loan forgiveness that was attempted and failed.
"Generally, looking at the last 30 years or so, it is evident that voters do not care about this issue very much" <- 100% agree.
My bias is that I don't give mulligans or asterisks to presidents[1]. Every administration faces a unique set of challenges, and some of those will be financial. Most of the others will involve large-scale finances. So I don't grant escapes to administrations that are hit by recession, war, or plague. That's literally part of the job.
How that relates to the (relevant!) factors you raise is that firstly, most of them were knowable at the time. Bush knew that tax revenue was falling when he proposed his tax cuts. He also planned two foreign wars without planning to pay for them. These were choices that were quite obviously, without the benefit of hindsight, going to lead to increased deficits.
Covid was unpredictable, but the administration had choices on how to handle the deficit spending. Notably, they did not choose to increase revenue in any meaningful way. And the administration was not blocked by Congress in this, raising revenue was simply not a concern mooted by the Executive. (They did not even add spring-loaded revenue increase that would trigger when the economy recovered.)
These choices to increase the deficit were made will roughly all the information we have now. Both choices were contemporaneously derided by deficit hawks; it is not a surprise that they raised the deficit.
But again, Dick Cheney was correct that deficits do not matter (to voters).
I legitimately cant tell who you are referring too, politics is so muddled now that both sides believe wholeheartedly that their side is the one with the correct plan to fix the economy.
I wrote it that way intentionally. The data are available, so it's easy enough to find out "who was president during the last budget surplus" and "who presided over the largest increase in the federal debt." Some people will be surprised by the answers and will see the data as partisan.
I'm not linking to sources because people feel the need to find the sources or they don't believe them. But there are a number of graphs of the numbers available on the Internet.
Suffice it to say that any adviser advising a presidential candidate to pay any attention to the deficit beyond lip service is doing that candidate a disservice, as voters have shown time and again that they simply do not care.
According to Investopedia [1], US debt rose most under administrations of FDR, Woodrow Wilson, and Ronald Reagan. This is pretty easy to explain by their terms coinciding with winning in WWII, WWI, and the Cold War respectively.
The last president to attain a budget surplus was indeed a surprise for me.
That's like crediting a football team's chapionship win 100% to the players and 0% to the coach. It's true in the most literal sense, yet widely missing the mark.
Congress does all legislation. Saying the President "just" signs legislation handily relieves the President of responsibility for any laws they sign during their tenure.
But Presidents typically take credit for their legislative wins, so we also give them credit for budgets they sign.
(It is also the case that one measure of the efficacy of an administration is the quality of the budgets they are able to coax out of Congress.)
Eh, the majority party in controls the budget negotiations, and the president is either the leader of that party or of the minority party. Either way there is considerably more involvement than just signing the result of other people’s work.
I think I first heard Biden say, "don't tell me what you believe, show me your budget and I'll tell you what you believe". He perhaps got it from Ted Kennedy who I doubt was the first person to say it, but I've just found it to be one of the simplest ways to cut through BS. Talk is cheap; doing the work is not. And as you say, when you look at the US budget deficit through the last half century, it's quite clear that the party that claims the mantle of fiscal responsibility it not on the level.
There was a surplus in the last year of the Clinton presidency, so I presume he's referring to George W Bush. There was also the whole 9/11 and War on Terror thing in the first year of his presidency though, so it's hardly a fair comparison. Gore would have blown his budget if he'd won too.
Largely speaking democrat administrations reduce the deficit while republican administrations increase the deficit, despite this being the polar opposite of political talking points.
I remember the budget hawks in the aughts saying that if the administration wanted to spend a ton of money on wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (this: unrelated to 9/11), that it would be fiscally prudent to raise tax revenue to cover the costs. Bush instead cut tax revenue substantially.
I'm not making a judgement either way, just saying that there was a choice here and Bush made the choice to increase the deficit. (Dick Cheney was correct when he advised Bush that deficits don't matter. The increase in the deficit indeed didn't matter to the electorate, and the deficit spending, in part via tax cuts, did win him a second term.)
Both Gore and Clinton were actual budget hawks. A big part of his campaign was highlighting the fact that the last few years had been budget surpluses, and talking about paying off the debt entirely.
We all know he would have been better than Bush, the bar is low, but you don't have to make it look like we missed out on the least shitty president in all of US history.
While the Congress certainly plays a major role, some of the hugest debt sources are wars, and getting into a war is never done without a presidential decision. Especially starting a war, like in Iraq in 2003.
To the best of my recollection, all of the budgets in the timeframe I mention were signed by the sitting president. (I realize this is not necessary for laws to take effect, but in the years I cited I believe the presidents all signed the budgets into law.)
If you want to argue that presidents are not responsible for laws bearing their signatures, I stridently disagree.
Presidents can only sign what is put in front of them. They have the option to veto, and sometimes do, but in many cases they may view that as the worst of two bad choices.
This position handily relieves the Executive branch of responsibility for any laws they sign during their tenure.
As Presidents typically take credit for their legislative wins, we also give them credit for budgets they sign. (And then we name them things like "Reaganomics.")
The budgeting process is a huge hairball of political Rube Goldberg contraptions, and who "proposes" the budget on paper has very little to do with the actual political maneuvering involved. As far as the point of this discussion is concerned, both Congress and the President are responsible, since both branches are deeply involved in the political maneuvering.
> voters soundly rejected a continuation of that regime
In that election the democrats had net gains in both houses of congress, the democratic presidential candidate won the popular vote, and the presidential election was won by 537 votes. I don't know how this could be called "soundly rejected."
Congress writes the budget, not the President's administration. What was notable about the late 90s was for the first time in 40 years the Democrats did not control the House of Representatives. One could argue that divided government forces compromise which is a good thing. Personally, I think the financial problems in the United States transcend political party.
I love the lack of self awareness from this author. "My generation of reporters was right to encourage the government to go into debt, but now it's different". No it's not, the consequences of the bad decisions in ~2010 are just catching up to us now. I guarantee you that there are people who want the government to deficit spend today who will say the same sort of thing 20 years from now as they get older and wiser.
I don't really think its that simple. There can be situations where debt is a good idea, and there can be situations where debt is a bad idea.
In ~2010, debt financing was incredibly cheap, so if the USA was able to take out debt at that time and use it for productive economic growth that paid more than the financing cost, it would have been a good investment.
The problem in my eyes isn't really that the USA took on debt when it was cheap, the problem was that:
1. it took out so much debt that now as those debts mature, they can't be paid off without taking on newer, much more expensive debts (and instead of treating that borrowing behaviour as temporary/uncertain, the government learned to treat it as a integral part of its budget).
2. the investments the USA made with that debt might not have been very smart investments. There's a huge amount of crumbling infrastructure in the USA that should have been prime targets for replacement in the era of low-cost debt, that are now going to be incredibly painful to maintain or replace, and aren't really optional. Yes, the USA did invest in a lot of things that boosted the GDP, but it's not really clear (to me at least) that the increase of economic activity was particularly productive, useful, or sustainable.
> There can be situations where debt is a good idea, and there can be situations where debt is a bad idea. In ~2010, debt financing was incredibly cheap, so if the USA was able to take out debt at that time and use it for productive economic growth that paid more than the financing cost, it would have been a good investment.
Sure, debt can be good idea when it's carefully considered and planned by a well run organization, preferably one where its leaders have their personal finances highly dependent on its success.
However the chronic issue almost every government has is that the government is neither well run, nor do the people running it suffer any financial consequences when things go poorly.
I don't have a realistic fix for this, of course, but it's fun to imagine annual performance reviews for politicians with guillotines available to HR.
> There can be situations where debt is a good idea, and there can be situations where debt is a bad idea.
Your examples seem to be saying a “good debt” situation would involve the government being wise in playing the market.
It’s arguable if the government should be playing the markets to any extent at all.
To my knowledge the purpose of (American) government involves the wise use of collecting and spending. It seems to always get in trouble when going after the carrot of investing.
I'm using the word "invest" in a pretty broad sense. I would consider, e.g. fixing the USA's disastrously undermaintained waterways, bridges, railroads, electrical grids, schools, etc. to be "investments" (and probably wiser investments than whatever it invested in instead)
It makes sense to go into debt to get out of a recession, like the 2008 one. But then during the good times of the economy, we should have been working on paying the debt; instead, we blew it and just took out even more debt.
Yeah, there was a pretty strong argument to raise taxes in 2017-2019 in order to prepare for a return of higher interest rates (or at the very least, not cut taxes further) but not much earlier in the decade. Obviously the pandemic necessitated deficit spending again, but we once again have a window of opportunity to put our economic gains into reducing the deficit.
To the Biden administration’s credit, it did pass the Inflation Reduction Act. Hopefully the next administration will let at least some of the Trump administration’s tax cuts expire and raise revenue in other areas.
1. the government repudiates the debt and the bonds become worthless (FDR did that partially with repudiating the gold bonds by forcibly replacing them with dollar bonds, and pocketing the difference in value).
2. simply print money to pay them off (aka Yellen's trillion dollar coin)
Of course, there would be major consequences from these banana republic measures.
I'm curious as to what alternative you invest in. The received wisdom is that TBills are the closest to a 'risk free' investment on the planet. However, as you're pointing out, historically with increasing debt, some kind of debt repudiation(whether explicit or implicit) has always happened.
The practical question becomes what is a safer alternative and perhaps more importantly, can we know that today.
(2) seems a million times more likely because currency supply increase is fairly obfuscated from its effects and the government can plausibly deny that it caused the resulting inflation.
Canceling the debt outright would be far too honest.
You might as well say there's no "magic number" of bricks we can stack on top of you before you are squished because we don't know precisely what that number is (yet.) But clearly there is a limit, even though we might have some difficulty saying exactly what it is.
Would a national debt of $0 be a point where the debt is a full-on crisis? Would a national debt of $999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999 be a point where the debt is a full-on crisis? If only there were some kind of conclusion we could draw from this, even if we don't have an exact number. Oh well, back to eating paste.
Disagree. If we had the ability to borrow $999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999 and spend it on useful projects, we’d be mining helium on the moon, colonizing Mars, terraforming Venus, building a Dyson sphere around the sun, and warping to Alpha Centuri. Our gross planetary product would probably be able to pay off the debt in a week or two.
That doesn't work, particularly the Venus and Dyson sphere ideas, because being able to borrow that much money doesn't actually give you access to the requisite resources and labor. Resources and labor isn't something you can just conjure out of the void as easily as adding zeros to an entry in a bank's database. If you brought such a ludicrous amount of money into existence, the amount of steel or man-hours a dollar could buy would be greatly diminished.
Furthermore, you presume the money would be spent on successful and profitable projects, rather than being squandered away. If only it were so easy.
Yes, but it’s an absurd number to begin with, so I think some poetic liberty is justified.
To make it slightly more realistic, let’s say the Galactic Development Bank of Betelgeuse offered us that amount as a loan, along with access to their expertise and trading partners, with 1000 years to pay it off.
My actual point is that in the ratio of debt to GDP, perhaps we should use projected future GDP in the denominator, rather than current GDP. This is why a hard upper limit on debt (or even debt-to-GDP ratio) is a dubious idea. It’s all about what the government does with the money.
Indeed, it's not a number. The loss of AAA status would mean the loss of the US's economic, technological, and military superiority first. After that, the specific number would matter as little as it does now.
I agree authors should be listed, but I disagree that this is odd. Especially in a time where points from scientific consensus are considered biased political points, it's the norm.
But why did the US lose their AAA rating? It has nothing to do with how much debt we have. It has far more to do with a non-functioning congress that simply decided it wasn't going to pay it. As has been said several times in this thread, it's political, not about the numbers themselves.
Ignoring sanctions the US has not defaulted on its debt since the 70s. Those periods where a new budget has not been approved resulted in the US being late to fulfill invoices but all of the coupons on the bonds still went out.
If that didn't happen a lot more than just the government's credit would unwind. That's the primary reason debt is still purchased despite the obvious fact that it will never be repaid.
I mean, that has already happened. But I think the point of that statement is there is no known number where once debt reaches, the US will be downgraded further.
Characterizing the problem as "debt" is misleading. The real problem is the government printing money. What we call the "national debt" is just government printed money where whoever "has" it can only draw on a portion of it (the interest) until a certain date (the maturity date of the government bond). And "paying back" the "debt" just means moving the government printed money from one account (the "bond" account) to another (the "bank account" of whoever gets the interest or sells the bond). The actual problem has nothing to do with "not being able to pay back the debt"; the government will just print more dollars (or more precisely, just move more accounting entries from the "bond" account to "bank" accounts). The actual problem is how printing money skews the economy and transfers wealth to the financial system from everyone else.
> The vast majority of money that is in the economy is created by banks with credit creation
That's the way it's described, but banks in this respect are only acting as agents of the government. They can only "create" money under rules prescribed by the government, and the government, through the Fed, controls how much of it they can create.
> The government, especially in the US, hasn't had a money printer for decades.
Whether I take this literally or metaphorically, it's false. Taken literally, the government does still print bills. Taken metaphorically, even apart from what is discussed above, the government, through the Fed, has done "quantitative easing" and other things that involve direct manipulation of the money supply, recently enough to make your claim false.
> That's the way it's described, but banks in this respect are only acting as agents of the government. They can only "create" money under rules prescribed by the government, and the government, through the Fed, controls how much of it they can create.
And the airlines and aircraft makers can only fly under rules prescribes by the government, specifically the FAA. That does not mean that they are acting as agents of the government.
You can only drive a car under the rules prescribes by your local traffic laws. That does not mean you are acting as an agent of the government.
Yes, there are rules. But following rules passed by government ≠ being (an agent of) the government.
The government did not create airlines, aircraft makers, cars, etc. It created the Fed through Federal law, as I responded elsewhere in this discussion.
As far as I understand the federal reserve is not technically part of the government but a private institution. It has shareholders not unlike a public company and those shareholders are the big banks like JPM. I'm not sure if those are the same as the so called primary dealers or if there is just an overlap. You are correct that the actual printing of physical cash is done by the government on behalf of the fed, I think by the treasury.
> It's established by Federal law; its Chairman is appointed by the President.
It's amusing that you think that the Fed is an instrument of the government, but other conspiracy theorists think it is an instrument of private banks:
> Griffin then turns his attention to the secret meeting that took place on Jekyll Island in 1910. He reveals how a small group of powerful bankers, including representatives from J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller, and other influential figures, devised a plan to create a central banking system that would serve their own interests. They realized that they needed to present the Federal Reserve as a government entity to gain public support, despite the fact that it was, in essence, a private institution.
The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 is not a "conspiracy theory", it's a fact. The events leading up to it are not a matter of serious dispute as far as I know. Of course the government and the Fed will give you a very different interpretation of those events, but their interpretation doesn't stand up to actual scrutiny.
> it is an instrument of private banks
It is both; it is part of the government (for the reasons I have already given), and it transfers wealth to private banks and financial institutions from everyone else by printing money. The private banks were tired of the government coming to them for a bailout every time there was a financial panic (the Panic of 1907 being the most recent one at the time), so they convinced Congress that creating a central bank would stop the panics. (It didn't, of course, but they convinced Congress that it would.) With the Federal Reserve in place, banks and financial institutions, as I've said, got wealth transferred to them whenever the Fed printed money, and also the burden of recovery from financial panics was transferred from the banks to the taxpayers (a recent example of course being the bailouts of 2008).
> What’s growing is spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. As you can see in the above chart, the CBO sees spending on “major health care programs” (including Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare subsidies) growing from 6.3 percent of GDP in 2024 to 9.8 percent of GDP in 2054; Social Security is set to grow from 5.2 percent of GDP in 2024 to 5.9 percent of GDP in 2054.
The US refuses to do many things that would save it money in the long run. Complete universal healthcare would save money and would enable more entrepreneurs as the US claims to love small business. Mitt Romney knows this and that is why Massachusetts has the best Medicaid coverage and why he wanted to take his Massachusetts plan to the federal level.
Health care costs were far, far lower when the US had a free market healthcare system (before WW2). The more the government took control of it, the more it cost.
And many other countries do have government-run healthcare (including just north of the border in Canada), and they spend less per capita and have better life expectancy:
That said, Medicare and other entitlements is where my mind went too as I was reading. Negotiating drug prices is a good step in this direction by the current administration.
>> A huge share of the US debt is held by the government itself, in vehicles like the trust funds of Social Security and Medicare. Still more was purchased by the Federal Reserve as part of its “quantitative easing” programs to fight the Great Recession and the Covid downturn.
>> Thus, it’s money that the federal government owes to itself. That makes it fairly unimportant, economically; it doesn’t actually limit the resources available to the government.
These are very common misunderstandings. The money borrowed from the trust funds are real debt that needs to be repaid. In particular when the boomers retire and the net flow of money is OUT of the funds rather than IN. Up until now, congress has happily spent that net inflow and now they owe it back which makes them hate social security. One politician was claiming its not "real" debt in some way and was corrected by someone at the Federal Reserve who insisted it's as real as any debt purchased by anyone else. Which brings us to the Fed - that's not the government borrowing from itself as the author says. The Fed might be OK with lending at lower rates than the treasury can get otherwise, but they aren't offering an infinite trough for congress to spend - only an emergency bandage.
The last few years have disproven this idea that we need to stop with debt spending. We just conducted a beautiful experiment: since 2020 the USA has had more deficit spending, more economic growth, and less inflation, than the EU, which has had less deficit spending, less growth, and more inflation.
A government without debt would be like a business without debt: obviously wasting good opportunities, instead of pursuing them aggressively.
But even that analogy is wrong, since a business has to make money to pay its debts, so a business does face some ultimate limit on how much debt it can take on. By contrast, the USA faces no such limit. We can always print as much money as we need to pay any debt. So long as we're willing to deal with the inflation, we can print as much money as we need.
But realistically, with birth rates falling, the government will have to engage in more and more stimulus spending as time goes by. We used to be able to rely on population growth to be the real engine of the economy, but we no longer have that. So to keep the economy going in the future, we will have to rely on immigration and deficit spending. And there, too, the EU offers an important counter-point: the USA has had a much easier time integrating immigrants, in part because of our deficit spending. By contrast, the EU is seeing how difficult it is to integrate immigrants in a climate of austerity. The EU is close to stalling, in that it needs immigrants to prop up economic growth but it is not printing enough money to put the immigrants to work -- a stall which could lead to a vicious downward cycle. Meanwhile the USA has pulled in millions of immigrants and also printed enough money to put them to work, resulting in strong economic growth.
"The last few moments have disproven this idea that ships need to stop hitting icebergs. Now, dear guests on this great ship Titanic, let us go back to enjoying our dinners!"
Timeframe matters a lot when you run an experiment.
Your comment doesn't make any sense. If you want an analogy similar to the USA versus the EU, but involving boats, then you should say: "We just ran a beautiful experiment using the Titanic and the Californian: one sunk and one didn't. And what was the difference in their policy? One ran into an iceberg and one did not. Therefore, we can conclude that ships should not run into icebergs."
We could also include that the Californian was wise to stop moving at night when it knew that icebergs were near.
The USA economy is unstoppable. The entire world agrees on this issue, that’s why investors from all over the world are pouring money into American investments and American financial instruments. The USA has the most dynamic and innovative economy in the world, and it has the strongest economic growth of any large economy.
I worry that the whole US economy is bloated and fragile due to govt spending but I am not an economist.
When the govt spends $7 trillion it basically goes to various Americans for various work. It's a $7 trillion injection to the economy. There are also various leeches or other businesses/work that aren't culled naturally via competition. This all worries me.
>> The question is, does that $7 trillion generate real good and services? More or less than the private sector would have generated?
That's the wrong question too. It needs to generate enough economic activity such that the TAX on that activity allows repayment of the $7 trillion. AFAICT it does not. If it did we would have a declining debt, but it's going the other direction so that's the answer.
That's the wrong question too. The government is not a for-profit enterprise, most of its activities are meant to be services that can not be (or should not be) profitably provided by the private sector. The military and benefits like Medicare and social security all fall into this category.
The government needs to, over the long term, raise taxes to the point where it can cover these expenditures. However there is an economic benefit to keeping taxes low. The right question is do the short term benefits of low taxes justify the long term costs of higher debt.
Further, where the government does make actual investments, those investments tend to be long term. A bridge that will stand for 100 years doesn't need to pay for itself in 10. It is entirely possible to spend money faster than you make it on profitable investments.
It would depend on the details, but i suspect government jobs have a higher average salary, better benefits, and more security. So we’d probably expect it to cost more to create better jobs.
Do you remember where you saw it? a quick google didn’t get me anywhere.
From what I've seen not only are they taking it from otherwise productive components of the economy they tend to produce and encourage economic actors that are a net loss themselves.
We'd probably see much higher GDP (after a short period of readjustment) if the spending was stopped cold turkey.
This story is incredibly frustrating because it seems to throw a lot of numbers at things (which isn't a bad thing, it's just not super useful) as if that's going to change things politically. Debt is political and the fundamentals of government debt have not changed at all.
Government debt is a red herring that many fiscal conservatives wave to say we're spending too much. Unfortunately those same conservatives don't actually want "fiscal responsibility", they want to cut programs they don't agree with and continue handing out lucrative military contracts that we arguably don't need.
Government debt has always been about borrowing today to fund growth for tomorrow. However, that's not what we're actually doing at all. Much of our current debt is due to COVID stimulous, which was an incredibly exceptional event. Of course that was more to "keeping things going" than fund growth initiatives. That's not to say that debt was "bad" or that we shouldn't have done it, but that much of the debt we're taking on is not going to fund infrastructure, education, or health which are all things that have significant long term benefits to society.
Lastly, debt only matters in comparison to rates. If you're borrowing lower than growth of GDP, then that borrowing is generally considered a net positive. Artificially deflating rates in the late 2010s and the rapid increase in rates post-COVID is not going to do well for government debt because we can't shift our budgets quickly enough to adjust. Of course that also assumes a functioning congress, which we certainly don't have.
Since it is a political issue, it will be a football and a dog whistle. Cut programs for minorities from the right, and raise taxes on the rich from the left. While one party is likely to be more irresponsible with this than the other, it's still not going to go away because it's never supposed to. Government debt is all about the cost to borrow compared to growth. The challenge we're at is that the cost is no longer cheap and we haven't been truly focusing on growth as much as we should. Instead we've just had political distractions.
> Lastly, debt only matters in comparison to rates. If you're borrowing lower than growth of GDP, then that borrowing is generally considered a net positive. Artificially deflating rates in the late 2010s and the rapid increase in rates post-COVID is not going to do well for government debt because we can't shift our budgets quickly enough to adjust. Of course that also assumes a functioning congress, which we certainly don't have.
The USA's debt-to-GDP ratio has been increasing for a very long time. Every once in a while, GDP growth starts to overtake debt growth for a few years and then the debt load ratchets up further. So if the plan is to outgrow the debt, that doesn't appear to really be working so far.
The thing that debt to GDP misses is the rates which need to be paid on that debt. For a while those rates were so low, it meant there was little reason to focus on paying down the debt, which is only going to keep that ratio relatively stagnant.
What is far more telling is the debt servicing to GDP ratio, which is far more useful in telling us how much our debt is costing us. This winds up looking wildly different than debt to GDP and has been a lot less concerning up until we've seen the latest spike in rates.
Yeah, that's a great point. But I will say that I think interest-to-GDP ratio is also a bit misleading here because what it doesn't capture is the uncertainty about future interest rates.
Because of the massive amounts of debt held by the USA, there is no option to just pay off the current debt. If there was a sharp increase in interest rates (or even just a long-protracted period of interest rates like the current one), the USA would have no option but to take out further debt at painfully high rates just to stay ahead of existing debts.
So even if interest payments aren't so bad currently, the large debt load is a large vulnerability.
Generally, looking at the last 30 years or so, it is evident that voters do not care about this issue very much.