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How Republicans Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Crushing Federal Debt

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Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 8:00 AM 8 min read

U.S. President Donald Trump (C) bangs a gavel after signing the

U.S. President Donald Trump (C) bangs a gavel after signing the "Big Beautiful Bill Act" at the White House in Washington, DC, on July 4, 2025. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI via Getty Images

WASHINGTON – Two decades after then-Vice President Dick Cheney declared that deficits don’t matter, members of his own party appear intent on proving his theory, adding another massive, multi-trillion-dollar slab onto the national debt.

Despite frequently expressing outrage about how much the country is borrowing to pay for basic operating costs, President Donald Trump and Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress voted to erode the tax base even further, increasing annual deficits and sending the federal debt to historic highs.

Trump inherited a robust economy with low unemployment in 2017 and yet, with a big tax cut, began generating $1 trillion-a-year budget deficits. When the COVID pandemic hit in the final year of his term, shrinking tax revenues while simultaneously requiring massive federal spending to avert a recession, the combination left Trump adding $8 trillion to the debt in just four years.

As he began his second term in January, the anticipated new debt already projected by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office totaled some $7 trillion, and that was before the $3.4 trillion his new legislation will add over the coming decade. If the temporary components of the just-passed tax bill — such as new deductions for the elderly and those earning overtime and tip income — are made permanent, that total would surpass $5 trillion.

Bobby Kogan, an economist with liberal Center for American Progress, said if there were ever a time to let expiring tax cuts lapse, as the 2017 Trump tax cuts would have this year, to put the country’s finances closer to a stable path, it was now, with low unemployment and a relatively strong economy.

“This would have been the time to do it, but instead they cut taxes even more,” he said.

Which means that by the time Trump is constitutionally required to leave office in 2029, the national debt will likely be $45 trillion — with Trump himself having contributed $18 trillion of it over two terms.

Which also means that interest on the federal debt is now among the top budget categories, near $1 trillion a year, and the country’s key ratio of debt to gross domestic product is near 100% and could pass 120% by 2035 – renewing fears of a debt crisis where investors both at home and abroad are no longer willing to lend the U.S. money by purchasing treasury bonds.

“Bad things don’t happen until they do,” said Justin Wolfers, an economics professor at the University of Michigan. “You can switch very quickly from everyone thinking everything’s OK to everyone freaking out.”

While Trump and his followers routinely lie that his tax cuts are the largest in history, that honor actually belongs to Ronald Reagan, who in 1981 pushed through reductions totaling 2.9% of the nation’s GDP at the time.

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