The United States (U.S.) public debt has reached $34 trillion for the first time, the Treasury Department announced.
The U.S. total outstanding debt rose to $34.001 trillion from $33.911 trillion a day earlier, the department’s daily report showed.
This would mean that the public debt exceeded the GDP, which, according to the data of the Ministry of Trade, amounted to 27.6 billion dollars at the end of September, writes Reuters.
In the middle of last year, the influential institute CBO, in which former officials of the U.S. Central Bank, Treasury Department and Congress work, estimated that the U.S. public debt could reach 98 percent of GDP in 2023.
In 2022, according to official data, it amounted to 97 percent of GDP, and in the past 30 years, it was an average of 57 percent.
By the end of this decade, it should grow to 107 percent and exceed the historical figure, and by 2053 it will reach, according to their estimates, 181 percent of GDP, according to the institute’s long-term estimates, published at the end of June.
Such a large debt would slow economic growth and increase interest payments to foreign holders of U.S. debt, and would pose a significant risk to the fiscal and economic outlook, the CBO warned.
U.S. lawmakers return to the benches next week to reach a deadline to agree on government spending in the new fiscal year.
If they do not reach an agreement, many state bodies would be threatened with a shutdown again.
The deal could be made more difficult by the upcoming presidential and congressional elections, Reuters notes.
White House spokesman Michael Kikukawa linked the rise in public debt to the 2017 tax cuts under Republican President Donald Trump and the Republican majority in Congress, Slobodna Evropa writes.
