While the income of the U.S. government will grow steadily, so too will its outgoings. By 2036, mandatory outlays such as Social Security and major health care programs such as Medicaid and Medicare will total more than $7 trillion, vying for the majority of the government’s funding before discretionary spending can be allocated.
Much of this is the result of America‘s aging population: According to the Population Reference Bureau, the number of Americans age 65 or older will grow from 58 million in the early 2020s to 82 million come 2050, representing a 42% increase. As such, Social Security outgoings will go from $1.6 trillion in 2026 to $2.7 trillion in 2036, and health care programs will grow from $1.9 trillion to $3.1 trillion. This means the combined increases in spending on health care programs and net interest outlays alone come to near a quarter of the size of America’s economy in 10 years’ time.
In other words, aging boomers have voted themselves increasingly lavish benefits, putting them on future generations’ proverbial credit card.
The most likely outcome—unless the U.S. is able to rebalance its books by growing the economy out of an unbalanced debt-to-GDP ratio—is that U.S. consumers are going to end up paying, at some point, for the debts accumulated by the generations before them. As such, nonpartisan think tanks including the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation are calling for guardrails to be introduced to ensure present and future governments do not continue running deficits outsized to their revenues.
“CBO’s latest budget projection is an urgent warning to our leaders about America’s costly fiscal path,” Peterson Foundation CEO, Michael Peterson, told Fortune in a statement. “Improving affordability for American families is a top priority for the nation. Borrowing trillion after trillion takes us in the wrong direction, leading to higher interest costs and higher prices for everyday needs.”
As Maya MacGuineas, president of the CRFB said in a statement earlier this week: “Unless lawmakers want record-high debts and deficits to be our norm, both sides of the aisle must come together to address our unsustainable borrowing. The longer lawmakers wait, the higher the price for Americans.”
This election year, Peterson claimed, voters understand the connection between rising debt and their personal economic condition, plus the financial markets are watching: “Stabilizing our debt is an essential part of improving affordability, and must be a core component of the 2026 campaign conversation.”
