US News:
National debt tops $22 trillion for first time, after Trump tax cut
Treasury Department:
Debt to the Penny (Daily History Search Application)
$16,157,240,020,401 in Treasuries
$5,855,600,871,283 in Intragovernmental
Needless to say, the big drivers these days are the Trump tax cuts, and last year's spending bills.
The most likely short-term impact will be an increase in interest rates. In the medium term, it will probably make it harder to borrow in a recession.
Someone better hope that MMT is accurate....
Here is the issue, and it always the same thing in our current economic model. What we should be evaluating are the reasons for additions to debt.
The federal government can and will borrow, making determinations as they go on the cost of doing so budget year to budget year (some would call service to debt.) The Fed will control interest rates as they have been, and even though they have slowly increased rates odds are they will have to back off of that depending on future indicators. The Federal Total Debt number *not* being one of those indicators.
What the Fed has been looking at is inflation indicators against GDP growth indicators - trend lines my friends, excess debt indicators between businesses and consumers - realized by the record numbers across all private debt sectors with no exceptions, and lastly the length of time we have been in an expansion economically speaking - something like 116 months straight suggesting the Fed is looking for an interest rate neutral point to deal with a suspected recession within the next 1-2 years. They have to have somewhere to go with an interest rate reduction when we experience economic faults.
To your point, where we should be critical is of Federal economic and tax policy during reasonable economic good times that increases Federal Debt when we should not. And that means we should be sharply critical of Trump and the associated Congress (you cannot leave them out) that gave a tax cut to the wealthy during a time in which there was no economic reason to do so.
Private wealth holding has broken records in recent years, the largest corporations wealth holding has broken records in recent years, and frankly corporate debt has broken records simply because borrowing has been so cheap that there is little reason not to borrow even when looking at business expansion rates (aggregate demand.) Since the last recession there have been two income quintiles that recovered fully and expanded... the very lowest 5th income quintile (where 7 to 8 of the top 10 employers in this nation pay their employees) and the very highest income quintile. What has not happened is a massive expansion of the middle income quintiles and that points to economic and tax policy faults.
The economy has had a very long growth period but not equitably felt by all economic participants.
That means that Republican ideology on protecting wealth at the expense of Total Debt is realized.
Even during our reasonable economic times we are adding to Total Debt at an alarming rate, and *that* puts us in a terrible position when the economy will go south next. When we have to go into further levels of debt to deal with the next set of aggregate demand faults we will be doing so from a position of already adding massive amounts of debt just to make Republicans happy about wealth protection. I think we will see 2018 land at $778 billion in deficit, up some 17% ('ish) from the previous year when the economy is still growing.
What we saw was Trump and Congressional Republicans triple down on "trickle down economics" that has never worked and added to debt each time usually during a time we did not need to.
You add to Total Debt by running deficits when there is an economic need to do so, when you have the government spending part of the GDP math handle faults with aggregate demand. What you do not do is add to Total Debt by running larger deficits to protect wealth already at record levels (in every possible way they could be record levels.)
