Submitted by David Howden via Mises Canada,

It’s not just homeowners who have to worry about rising interest rates, the Federal government might soon get a taste of its own medicine.

With the Fed doing all it can to stimulate inflation, increases to interest rates are taking a front seat amongst borrowers’ fears. From the admittedly partisan Republican Senate Committee on the Budget comes this report outlining how federal interest outlays will dovetail with other expenses in the future.

To summarize:

The U.S. gross federal debt currently stands at $17.548 trillion, and net interest payments to our creditors are the fastest-growing item in the budget. In 2014, the Congressional Budget Office projects that the nation will spend $233 billion on interest payments. By the end of the budget window in 2024, however, CBO forecasts that interest payments will nearly quadruple to an astonishing $880 billion. Every dollar spent paying our creditors is a dollar wasted—money for which we get nothing in return. Interest payments threaten to crowd out every other budget item. To put the $880 billion, single-year interest payment in perspective, here is what we currently spend on other budget items:

Federal Courts – $7.4 billion

Department of Education – $56.7 billion

Secret Service – $1.8 billion

Food Inspection – $2.3 billion

Census Bureau – $1.0 billion

Border Patrol – $12.3 billion

National Parks – $3.0 billion

NASA – $17.6 billion

Centers for Disease Control – $7.1 billion

Federal Prison System – $6.9 billion

Workplace Safety Inspections – $0.9 billion

Immigration and Customs Enforcement – $5.6 billion

FDA – $2.6 billion

Federal Highway Budget – $40.4 billion

Coast Guard – $10.0 billion

Small Business Loans – $0.9 billion

Veterans’ Health Care – $55.3 billion

FBI – $8.3 billion

Every debt incurred today will be paid off in the future. The graph above may be shocking to some, but it’s only a very small part of the picture. This is just interest on debt, and doesn’t even include the costs of repaying the principal. Of course, the principal never really gets repaid as the government just borrows afresh to paper over its old debts, but the interest must be covered lest savers stop lending money to the government.