For well over a decade, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has been issuing stark warnings about the nation's current debt levels and the long-term buildup of debt they portend.
The ominous opening paragraph to the CBO's 2010 report on the nation's long-term budget outlook, for example, noted that "large budget deficits have caused debt held by the public to shoot upward; the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that federal debt will reach 62 percent of GDP by the end of this year—the highest percentage since shortly after World War II." Some of that was due to declining tax revenues and increased spending during the Great Recession, and some of the fiscal gap was expected to close as the effects of the crisis receded. But much of the projected long-term buildup of federal debt was a result of "an imbalance between spending and revenues" that predated the economic shocks of the late 2000s. The second paragraph makes the case rather bluntly: "Over the long term, the budget outlook is daunting."
