Why the National Debt Keeps Growing

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]Why is it that the national debt never seems to go down no matter which party is in charge? To understand why, you have to go back to the only point in American history when the national debt was zero, nearly 200 years ago. In 1835, America paid off its entire national debt during the presidency of Andrew Jackson. Yet, within 2 years, Congress was running deficits again. Not because the politicians who came after Jackson were uniquely irresponsible, but because the political pressure to spend never goes away even if the economic pressure to pay for it sometimes does. The fact is that every politician who adds to the debt is making a perfectly rational choice from their perspective. Because elected officials can only answer to one of two groups, voters who want something today and future taxpayers who will foot the bill tomorrow. But, the first group votes right now, while the second often isn't even born yet. So, for the politicians, the math is very simple.

[00:00:55]You spend now and win re-election, or you defend future generations who don't even exist yet and probably get voted out of office as a result. And once you understand that, it becomes clear the problem isn't the people we keep electing. It's what we keep asking them to do once they're already in office. In 1981, the national debt crossed $1 trillion for the first time. By 1989, it had nearly tripled to 3 trillion. By 2001, it was almost 6 trillion. By 2009, it was almost 12 trillion. Today, it sits at a staggering 39 trillion and it's growing by about a trillion dollars every 100 days. And the one time we came close to reversing it, Congress proved the rule. The budget surpluses of the late '90s didn't trigger a national push to pay down the debt. Within just a few years, Congress used that surplus as justification to increase spending until the surplus eventually vanished and America's path to eventual insolvency resumed. And this is the moment people always overlook. In 1986, the economist James Buchanan won the Nobel Prize for explaining exactly this mechanism.

[00:01:59]Politicians aren't stupid when they run deficits. They're responding perfectly rationally to the incentives in front of them. In short, the system is working exactly as its incentive structure demands. That incentive structure is why America now spends more on interest payments than we do on the entire defense budget. Each of these individual acts of political self-interest compound over time. And now that bill has become one of the largest line items in the entire federal budget. Every 2 years we hold an election and hope the next group will be different. But Buchanan's point was that the politicians doing the spending are the product rather than the source of the problem. You could fill Congress with the most fiscally responsible human beings alive and the incentive structure would eventually grind them down or vote them out. Or, as another economist Thomas Sowell once said, "The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy. [music] We've been waiting for the right people to fix this for 90 years, but the right people aren't coming not until the people stop demanding the impossible."