Total US debt has topped US$40 trillion for the first time, the Treasury Department said this week, drawing fresh warnings that a fiscal crisis is brewing as ballooning costs for social safety-net programmes and interest payments far outstrip revenues held back by tax cuts.
A reporter asked Trump if he had been discussing the figure as he was about to board Air Force at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland.
“I have, and it’s been a problem for 35 years. And what we have now that we’ve never had before, we had a pretty good piece of it in my first term, as you know, is we have tremendous growth. And the way you take care of debt is with growth. And we have tremendous growth. We’ve never had growth like we have right now. The growth will take care of that very easily,” he said.
The federal government’s debt has now more than doubled in less than a decade, from US$19.95 trillion when Trump was sworn in as president for the first time in January 2017.
Roughly one-third of that increase occurred during two years of frantic government borrowing to fund the Covid-19 pandemic responses undertaken by Trump and former president Joe Biden, while the fiscal policy choices of both presidents combined with long-running tax-and-spending imbalances account for the rest. (Reuters)
