This week the US Federal Government released new budget data for proposed allocations in 2020. The big news is that the federal deficit will exceed $1 trillion. When you think that revenues are expected to be $3.6 trillion, the realization is that the deficit is 30% of revenue (I know, everyone shows the revenue as a percentage of expenditure...23%...but why... the revenue is what we need to pay off the growing debt).
On the subject of paying debt back, the budget figures suggest that interest on debt will be $479 billion. This is just a little less than the entire budget of the Department of Defense ($576 billion) and 20% of the revenues raised from non-payroll taxes like Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security (which are all collected to pay off expenditures with similar titles).
Let that settle in for a second: 20% of the income, corporate and trade taxes (plus) collected by the federal government goes to paying interest on debt. That is about 5 times more than the federal government spends on the Department of Health and Human Services (which will receive $89.6 billion in 2020 according to estimates).
How does that compare with other countries? I don't have good comparative data to share, unfortunately, but I can show the percentage of overall central government revenue that goes to interest payments for a variety of countries (based on World Bank data). It is shown in the graph below. See how the USA interest on debt in 2018 is around 16% of revenue. It was less than 14% in 2016 and only reached the high levels of today in the period around the 2008 financial crisis. Note also that interest payments eat into government revenues much more in the USA than they do in the other countries I show.
Ouch. Seems like something citizens should not be very happy about. Government has been authorized by citizens to manage public finances and borrow when needed. But surely the effective use of that authority would require government being more careful about the implications of debt on repayments...