Is America heading toward a national debt crisis' As an economic adviser to President Biden and an economist active in mainly Democratic policy circles since the late 1980s, I've spent most of my career dismissing arguments that any debt-ratio level signifies a 'crisis.' I still think that's true, even as our publicly held debt has reached 100 percent of our GDP. But I also now believe that if you're not worried about this country's fiscal outlook, you're not paying enough attention. What changed' The national debt held by the public, about $31 trillion, is now the size of the U.S. economy, up from 39 percent of the economy in 2008 and 79 percent in 2019. For most of the country's history, the fact that the economy's growth rate surpassed the interest rate on the debt enabled us to keep paying our bills. But as my colleagues and I show in a policy brief for the Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research, the fiscal outlook today is much more challenging. We concluded that the...
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