Kate Davidson
speaker
334 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2017
last heard Jun 2021
Kate Davidson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, interest on the debt is the fastest growing part of the federal budget.
Thinking about it more broadly, some of the bigger drivers of the debt do include programs like Medicaid and Social Security, in part because the population is growing older.
Those baby boomers are retiring.
They are drawing more from those programs, and those programs are getting more expensive.
But what we're seeing right now, the costs that are going up the fastest are these interest costs.
Well, over the past decade or so, the costs have been pretty manageable, and that's primarily because the Federal Reserve has kept interest rates near zero after the recession.
A few years ago, they started very slowly raising them,
and they're projected to continue raising them through next year.
We had a few rate increases in 2018.
We expect one more perhaps in December, and then three or four next year.
And as that happens, of course, interest rates are going up.
So in the past year alone, interest payments rose 20%.
Another factor, too, is just that the overall size of the debt is going up.
So it's the size of the debt and interest rates that are contributing to this higher amount.
And as you mentioned, Charlie,
Just within a few years, that's going to mean that these interest payments are amounting to more than we spend on the entire Medicaid program, for example.
That's just by 2020.
By 2023, it could be bigger than the whole defense budget.
So it's really adding up.
I mean, that's how the thinking goes.
Showing 201–220 of 334 · page 11 of 17
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