Forget debates over inflation, immigration, or abortion. If there’s anything President Trump and Vice President Harris share, it’s that neither of them is likely to conquer an issue that is poised to strike the next generation — America’s $35 trillion national debt.

The Committee for a Responsible Budget estimates Trump’s plans to freeze spending and lower taxes could add $7.5 trillion to the federal budget deficit, which stood at $1.8 trillion at the end of fiscal year 2024 on September 30. The increase depends on whether his tariff revenues would cover his tax cuts along with additional expenditures to secure the border and deport illegal immigrants. 

The same organization predicts that Ms. Harris’s platform promises could expand the deficit by $3.5 trillion. Her plans to increase income taxes on wealthy individuals to 39.6 percent and on corporations to 28 percent would be unlikely, according to the analysis, to cover the total cost of her plans for greater spending on middle- and lower-income families. 

“Most people view government spending as free resources,” the director of a center on the federal budget at the Heritage Foundation, Richard Stern, tells the Sun. 

Mr. Stern, who previously served as a lead staffer on budgetary issues for the Republican Study Committee in Congress, offers a picture of what this spending really means: “Whenever the government commits to spend a dollar, it’s committing to steal a dollar.” Federal spending, he reasons, is financed through taxation or money printing — “the first overtly steals, while the second siphons purchasing power out of existing dollars and into the new ones.”

The debt crisis is driven by interest payments. This year, America’s spending on interest is expected to hit $870 billion — exceeding the $822 billion that the nation will spend on defense, according to the Congressional Budget Office. 

The federal debt held by the public is nearly equal to the gross domestic product and is forecasted to reach a record 106 percent of GDP by 2028, matching the record hit to finance World War II.

The CBO projects that the weight of the debt will reduce income growth by 12 percent over the next three decades, as debt payments crowd out other investments. Social Security’s Old Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund, for one, is on track to run out of money by 2033. If that happens, current law dictates that Social Security benefits be slashed automatically. The result would be a 21 percent reduction in benefits for Social Security recipients, according to a working paper by Andrew Biggs and Kristin Shapiro in the American Enterprise Institute. Economists also warn that the mounting debt load raises the risk of a financial crisis.

Signs of weaker foreign buying interest in American treasury bonds is one reason that market yields have surged over the past two months. Writing in Bloomberg, economist Mohamed El-Erian  reports that the yield on 10-year Treasury bonds rose by 60 basis points over the past two months, to approximately 4.3 percent from 3.7 percent, an unexpected move after the Federal Reserve increased the size of its interest rate cuts 50 basis points from 25 basis points on September 18. 

Trump, the self-proclaimed “King of Debt,” is campaigning on tackling the deficit. Billionaire investor John Paulson told the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday that if he served as Treasury secretary in a second Trump administration, he would work to slash federal spending by extending Trump’s expiring 2017 tax cuts and eradicating subsidies for green energy from the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Biden signed into law in 2022. 

By contrast, Mr. Paulson — one of the world’s most influential gold investors — cautioned Fox Business in September that if Ms. Harris is elected, “I’d go into cash, and I’d go into gold, because I think the uncertainty regarding the plans they outlined would create a lot of uncertainty in the markets…”

Another key ally, Elon Musk, said last week that if Trump appointed him as the head of a new “government efficiency commission,” he could cut “at least $2 trillion” from the annual federal budget, which stood at $6.75 trillion in fiscal year 2024, according to the CBO. Mr. Musk has said he plans to achieve these spending reductions by cutting overhead costs, as he did when he fired 80 percent of the workforce of Twitter, now X, and the company saw higher profit margins and an expanded market. 

“The federal government is utilizing labor resources and other resources tremendously inefficiently compared to the private sector,” Mr. Stern says. He says that bolstering the efficiency of federal operations could buy Washington decades to fix the long-running debt burden.

Mr. Stern contends that absolute estimates of the deficit disregard the effects of fiscal policy on the overall economy and that a Trump administration, with its “pro-growth” tax cuts, would produce a smaller deficit than a Harris administration. He adds that while Harris’s proposed tax increases would bolster government revenue, they would simultaneously constrict economic activity, “cannibalizing the economy” and creating a debt that is larger as a share of the economy. 

Trump, however, has stopped short of proposing the entitlement reform needed to diminish the debt issue, as Social Security and Medicare make up nearly half of federal spending. He had also promised to cut spending in his first term, though the laws and executive orders he signed added a combined $8.4 trillion to the debt over a ten-year period, the Committee for a Responsible Budget determined. 

Many Americans care about how much it will cost the government to pay for what it is promising. More than 90 percent of both Harris and Trump voters across seven key swing states say it’s important for presidential candidates to address the national debt in their economic proposals, according to a new report by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. 

Yet in September’s presidential debate, not one question was asked about the nation’s overspending problem, which is shared by both political parties. A former George W. Bush administration official, Bruce Mehlman, has found that the last four presidents are responsible for most of the expansion of federal debt. “Both the two Republicans and two Democrats in the 21st century have red ink on their hands,” Mr. Mehlman told the Sun. 

Ultimately, the level of the budget deficit under either administration will depend on the political makeup of Congress, as both presidential candidates’ plans require Congressional approval to pass. If the next powerplayers in Washington don’t play their cards right on this issue, America’s preeminence on the world stage could collapse. 

Historian Niall Ferguson offers a bleak warning: “Any great power that spends more on debt service than on defense,” as America does, “will not stay great for very long. True of Habsburg Spain, true of ancien régime France, true of the Ottoman Empire, true of the British Empire, this law is about to be put to the test by the U.S. beginning this very year.”