U.S. Government Debt Exceeds $30 Trillion for the First Time

The national debt of the United States for the first time exceeded $30 trillion, according to data published by the U.S. Treasury Department.

In the column “total national debt” is designated the amount of $ 30.012 trillion. This is a record figure of the U.S. national debt for all the time of its existence.

The current values were reached several years earlier than expected. This was the result of trillions of dollars in federal spending that the United States has devoted to fighting the pandemic, including $5 trillion to pay extended unemployment benefits, financial support for small businesses and stimulus payments financed with borrowed money.

Amid the decline in COVID-19 cases in the first half of 2021, the U.S. economy saw a sharp rebound in GDP growth: 6.3% in the first quarter and 6.7% in the second. However, growth slowed to 2.3% in the third quarter. Experts attributed this to the spread of the Omicron strain, high inflation (it reached 6.8% at the end of December 2021, the highest rate since 1982) and problems in global supply chains.

In the last year of Donald Trump’s presidency (2020), the U.S. economy contracted by 3.5%, the first decline since the 2008 financial crisis and the largest since 1946 (then the country’s GDP fell by 11.6%). The Federal Reserve predicts 5.5% growth for the first year of Joe Biden’s presidency. Because of the ongoing pandemic, the U.S. government is also forced to take more and more loans – as of the end of 2021 the national debt was more than $ 29 trillion (about 125% of GDP), forcing the authorities to raise the debt ceiling to $ 31.4 trillion.