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To me the elephant in the room is the cost of servicing the debt.

Even if the US has a bunch of runway before shit actually hits the fan, 2024 saw over a trillion dollars servicing the debt. That could be funding a lot of government programs instead.

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Let’s look at the numbers:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYOIGDA188S

Seems not ideal, but also not terrible. We have much less of a hole to dig our way out of than we did in the 1990s. Certainly doesn’t look like a crisis. The recent jump seems entirely caused by the response to the Covid crisis and not really a structural problem.

Unlike now, in the 90s the US had no competitors with equally strong industrial capacity.

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