Now that President Donald Trump is back in office and Republicans control both the House and Senate, the difficult work of turning the country around begins. And one of the biggest challenges is the massive federal debt, which is spiraling towards crisis. The national debt now sits at more than $36 trillion and growing, with critics warning that entitlement spending will grow out of control if left unchecked.
While entitlement spending is a huge driver of the national debt, out-of-control discretionary spending has been the primary culprit in the exploding debt over the last four years. "You had the so-called infrastructure bill, the American Rescue Plan, the Inflation Reduction Act, and all kinds of other bills that were given deceiving or misleading names---all of that amounted to literally trillions upon trillions of dollars, and that is what has driven the deficit more than anything," says EJ Antoni, economist with the Heritage Foundation.
"For the time being, the big driver of the debt and deficit is not actually entitlement programs like Social Security, the big problem is all the additional spending politicians keep throwing on," he continues.
Antoni tells KTRH a good place for Trump and Republicans to start turning this debt around is to eliminate all the extra spending that was added under Biden and Democrats over the past four years. "If Biden had not gone on his spending spree, if he had simply done nothing and allowed spending levels to return to where they were before COVID---that's literally all he had to do---then we would have a balanced budget today," he says.
"If you have some real fiscal discipline, then you add on top of that pro-growth policies like tax cuts and energy dominance...these are all things that will increase our national wealth faster than we increase the debt, and eventually cause the debt to not only slow its growth but turn into an outright decline," says Antoni.
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