by Kevin Killough
Vice President JD Vance said Thursday that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has a “very discreet plan” to increase economic growth so that it rises faster than the $40 trillion national debt, and the plan has President Donald Trump’s backing.
Vance said that the Trump administration inherited America’s debt problem from the Biden-Harris administration, and the problem is that the debt grows faster than the American GDP.
“And if you look, we are on track. So even though the debt is too high, even though we inherited this debt bomb from the Biden administration, we actually do have a plan to get the economy growing faster than the debt. And that’s the most important thing,” Vance told Newsmax‘s Carl Higbie.
A 2024 analysis by the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated that Trump’s policies during his first term added $8.4 trillion to the national debt over a 10-year period. That’s compared with the $4.3 trillion Biden approved in his first three years and five months in office.
Excluding policies addressing the COVID-19 pandemic, the group estimated that Trump’s policies added $4.8 trillion in the 10-year period, compared with $2.2 trillion for Biden.
Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said, “The gross national debt has doubled in the last ten years; in less than twenty years, it has quadrupled. And today, we have confirmation that the debt has reached a new milestone of $40 trillion. It is staggering how predictable the fiscal decline of a global power can become.”
“For perspective, it took nearly 200 years for America’s gross debt to reach $1 trillion for the first time in 1981. At that time, President Reagan told the nation in a televised address, ‘If we as a nation needed a warning, let that be it.’ Jumping to America’s 250th year, we are spending more than that just on interest payments on our debt,” she added.
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Kevin Killough is a reporter for Just the News. Zachery Schmidt is the digital editor of The Star News Network and contributed to this story.
Eliminate “entitlement” fraud and that will go a long ways towards balancing the budget.