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Getty Images Sooner than later Seeking Alpha wishes our subscribers a beautiful holiday and a Happy Fourth of July! Wall Street Breakfast won't be published with markets closed on Thursday, but tune back in Friday. Debt levels are a big worry, with both presidential candidates adding trillions to the national deficit during their first terms in office. It's a problem because measures like tax increases and spending cuts are not popular with contenders who only consider four years at a time, while it can take a while to feel the higher costs related to debt servicing.
In fact, the U.S. is set to spend $892B on interest payments in the current fiscal year, more than the figure earmarked for defense spending, and that number is set to top $1T in 2025, which is close to the total budget for Medicare.
Quote: "Fiscal policy is a job for elected people. We're not elected people, so we don't comment on it - particularly in advance of a presidential election," Powell said at an ECB conference in Portugal. "I will say more broadly, though, the United States is running a very large deficit at a time when we're at full employment.
The level of debt that we have is not unsustainable, [but] the path that we're on is unsustainable - that's completely not controversial. This is something that should be a top-level issue. You can't run these kinds of deficits [even] .