Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Politicians have repeatedly warned about our growing debt, to no avail. During Donald Trump’s first administration, Senator Rick Scott argued in 2019 that high debt levels could lead to a “sovereign debt crisis,” as the cost of servicing “the national debt will increase faster and faster.”

At the 2012 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama warned that long-term debt would then consume an increasingly large share of the federal budget.

As a senator in 1995, Joe Biden echoed that concern during the balanced-budget-amendment debate, saying that if the country stayed on its existing fiscal path, “an increasingly larger share of every tax dollar” would go toward reducing interest on the debt.

Despite these warnings, we also know, as shown in a second graph in Guess Who Is Responsible for Our National Debt?, that the administrations of Obama, Trump, and Biden all made the largest nominal contributions to the national debt of any past administrations, each exceeding $8 trillion.

When debt climbs, neither inflation nor interest rates automatically go up. 

The basic, common-sense conclusion these politicians and media commentators drew is that as the debt grows, so will the share of the federal budget devoted to paying it. I began collecting data to illustrate this trend. However, I ran into a problem. It’s not that simple. In fact, more than just debt size determines how much of our budget goes to servicing our debt.

A chart that has been ignored.

The chart below shows how the total debt and public debt have continually risen since the beginning of Bill Clinton’s Administration. It also shows how much of the federal budget was devoted to paying debt and what the interest rate on that debt was.

Explaining the above chart.

On the left side (Y axis) is the size of the total federal debt. On the bottom (X axis) are the years spanning the presidential administrations from Bill Clinton to September 2026, during Donald Trump’s second administration. On the right side are the percentages of the effective interest burden rate of the federal budget.

The thick blue line shows how total debt has steadily risen since the beginning of Bill Clinton’s Administration. In fact, total debt began rising continuously under Ronald Reagan. For brevity and space, the graph begins with Clinton. The end point of this line is at the $40 trillion total debt we now have.

The red line below it, which tracks closely with the line above, is our public debt, which has accounted for about 80% of total debt for more than a decade.

Total debt includes public debt and intragovernmental debt owed to internal trust funds, such as Social Security and Medicare. However, when Social Security redeems its Treasury securities to pay benefits, Treasury must obtain resources elsewhere—through taxes, other revenues, or borrowing from the public. In other words, the Treasury converts an intragovernmental obligation into a need for cash and resources.

The thin blue line shows the share of the budget used to pay down debt. The thin red line shows interest rates on the debt. Leaders on both sides expected that growing debt would place a greater burden on the budget and increase interest costs.........

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