Maya MacGuineas: Washington should make a pledge: No new debt for the rest of 2022

Maya MacGuineas is president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and head of the Campaign to Fix the Debt. She recently wrote an opinion piece for The Hill, an excerpt of which is below.

The United States borrowed $13 trillion over the past decade – including over $5 trillion in efforts to fight COVID over the past three years and the remaining $8 trillion because lawmakers preferred not to pay for their policies.

While there are times the nation needs to borrow for economic reasons — COVID and the Great Recession are perfect examples — now is most certainly not one of them. With inflation reaching a 40-year high this year, additional borrowing makes the Federal Reserve’s job of fighting inflation all the more difficult and is the opposite of what is needed.

Read the entire piece here.

Published works by members or staff of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget do not necessarily reflect the views of all members or staff of the Committee. 

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Student Loans Cost $340 Billion More than Expected

Based in part on new data from the Congressional Budget Office, this piece shows: The estimated federal cost of student loans issued between 2015 and 2024 has increased by $340 billion – from a projected gain of $135 billion in the 2014 baseline to an expected loss of $205 billion in the 2024 baseline. Much of the cost increase can be explained by the expansion and increased enrollment in income-driven repayment (IDR). In forward projections, graduate school loans are now nearly as subsidized as undergraduate loans and make up half of the cost of newly issued student loans. Reforming graduate loans to be cost-neutral would generate over $100 billion in deficit reduction over the next decade.

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