The national debt has ballooned to $33.8 trillion dollars, which is 124% of the United States' GDP. Yahoo Finance spoke to Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi, who outlined why this is a "big problem" for the country claiming that "we are going to be paying, soon, more in interest expense on our debt than we do to fund our defense budget." Questions now arise as to how serious the problem is and what steps can the government take to alleviate this issue.
Maya MacGuineas, President of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), joins the Live show to give insight into what steps the government can take and how much investors need to worry about this mounting issue.
"If you take this year so far in terms of our actual deficit, how much we borrowed, it was much worse than it should have been — it basically doubled from a previous year during a period where the economy was strong," MacGuineas says. "But at the same time, lawmakers actually passed policies that improved the situation significantly. Really notable because it's the first time that's happened in a decade."
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