No matter the result of next month's election, President Joe Biden will soon leave the White House. That makes it a good time for a nearly final assessment of his and Vice President Kamala Harris' first-term legacy on federal spending and debt—a tragedy of epic proportion. Unfortunately, neither Harris nor her rival on the campaign trail has made a priority of fixing this problem.
According to brand-new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) numbers, the 2024 budget deficit is around $1.8 trillion. It's heading to $2.8 trillion in 10 years, assuming a very rosy scenario. Worrisome too is that interest payments on government debt will eat up over 20 percent of revenue in 2025. As the Hoover Institution's Joshua Rauh noted, if you remove the revenue earmarked for the Social Security Old Age and Disability Insurance program, that number jumps to 27.9 percent and rising.
