CRER director and chief economist Howard Wall and Scott L. Probasco Distinguished Chair of Free Enterprise Claudia Williamson Kramer provide their perspectives on the Federal debt.
“In World War II, we borrowed a lot of money to finance buying weapons and arming the world to fight Nazis and Japan,” Howard Wall, chief economist at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, said in a phone call. “Now, we’re borrowing money and just handing it over to ourselves to spend.”
Recent estimates indicate about 10 cents of every dollar collected in taxes are going toward paying down the nation’s debt, Kramer said. That’s money that won’t be invested in infrastructure, education or funding programs like Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. Taken together, the debt exceeded the country’s average gross domestic product of about $29 trillion in 2024.