US Now Spends More Servicing Its Debt Than On National Defense

Thanks to rising yields, the US government now has to spend more each year on servicing its immense debt burden than it spent on national defense in 2022. The calculation is based on estimated annualized debt payments as of end of April versus the Treasury’s release of last year’s budget expenditures. If you want one stat to sum up why debt-ceiling negotiations are so fraught this time around, making them both harder to conclude and