The $39 trillion debt is set to surpass its WWII peak—and the math says Washington can’t simply cut its way out

By the time President Harry Truman left office in 1953, the United States had spent the better part of a decade paying down the debt it had run up to win World War II. The peak—reached in 1946—was 106% of GDP, a number so large that policymakers spent a generation treating it as the high-water mark of what the country could survive.

That mark is about to fall.

According to a new chart book, Spending, Taxes, and Deficits: A Book of Charts, released in April by Jessica Riedl, a budget and tax fellow at the Brookings Institution, the federal debt held by the public is projected to reach 137% of GDP within a decade—blowing way past the World War II peak. It’s what what budget analysts now call a “current-policy” baseline that assumes the extension of expiring tax cuts and roughly stable discretionary spending.

The gross national debt itself crossed $39 trillion in March in less than five months after it hit $38 trillion, and is what the Peter G. Peterson Foundation called a “staggering” pace of accumulation with few precedents outside wartime.

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