May 11, 2026

The below transcript is a translation of the podcast audio that has been machine generated by Adobe Podcast.

Hi everyone. My name is Taylor St. Germain with ITR economics. Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of TrendsTalk. We at ITR are your apolitical and unbiased source of economic intelligence. And today I wanted to discuss a 2030 trend. It’s been a little while since we’ve checked in on 2030, so I thought it was important to bring you all an update here. As always, you can head over to ITR’s website, we’re constantly updating you on 2030 through presentations and blogs. But I wanted to bring one element of the 2030’s to our attention today, which is the national debt. We do receive a lot of questions, whether it’s from the stage or from our consulting clients or just from followers of ITR, if 2030 is still on track, and the answer to that is yes. And for those of you that might be tuning in for the first time, ITR Economics is forecasting the next major economic downturn to begin in 2030 for the United States. We’ve been projecting this since 2014, so it’s not anything new to our long time listeners. But there are five key elements that come along with this 2030 projection. It’s demographics, healthcare costs, entitlements, that’s Social Security cost, inflation, and national debt.

While I’ll touch on a few of these, I really wanted to put the national debt into the front because it is so important to us that we understand the drivers behind the national debt and how this evolves over time. Now I share a slide while I’m giving presentations on stage. And it, I call it a dumbed down version of the US balance sheet is really the way I like to refer to it. It’s showing three costs and then a source of income. Those three costs are transfer payments, interest payments on the national debt, consumption expenditures. And then the one, I guess, revenue source is our tax receipts here in the US. So I wanted to give you an update on this dumbed down version of the US balance sheet, if you will. When we look at our transfer payments, that’s Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, stimulus checks, all those elements, we are spending about $4.7 trillion on transfer payments alone. When we look at consumption expenditures, schools, post offices, infrastructure, the things we need to make this country run, we’re spending about $1.5 trillion on that. And then when we look at interest payments on the national debt, we have now crossed above $1.2 trillion. So those are three expenses. Again, $4.7 trillion, about $1.5 trillion and then another $1.2 trillion. When we look at our tax receipts, those are currently between $3.6 and $3.7 trillion. So my point in sharing this is we don’t make enough money in tax receipts to cover transfer payments, let alone interest payments, let alone consumption expenditures. What does this mean? It means our national debt is going to continue to increase. We are spending more money than we’re making. Surprise, surprise, many of you who live in the United States are well aware of this fact.

The challenge is this gets exacerbated as we move closer to 2030, because when we think of 2030, one of the big challenges that comes along with 2030 is the demographics. We have this big baby boomer generation who will be retiring, and that will be a significant increase in our health care costs, our social security costs, thus that transfer payments number, that’s going to continue to increase the national debt, which will increase our interest payments as far as servicing the debt. So you can see the concern that we ultimately have. That’s why that national debt piece is one part of this equation. And again, a lot of folks will say to me, well, Taylor, I’ve heard this national debt problem since the 1980s, why is 2030 more prominent? Because you’re layering the demographic challenge on top of it.

And really where this can breed challenges is think of the US treasuries, right? We’ve always been the safe haven here in the US. If the global economy’s falling apart, buy US treasuries, we’re guaranteed to pay you back. Well that’s a little tougher message for the US, right. We’ve seen our credit being downgraded over the past few years, we continue to see this interest expense rise, we have challenges in Congress all the time of passing new funding and new debt ceilings. So there’s a lot to be concerned with there as we look at 2030. And when we look at our current debt to GDP ratio, our debt to GDP ratio, this is gross public federal debt as a percent of nominal GDP. As of this recording today, with the most recent data through the first quarter of this year, we are at 122.6%. So we are well exceeding our GDP from a debt standpoint, and that’s another big concern that we have as we move into the 2030s.

Now, as we look at the TrendsTalks for the next few weeks, I’m going to have some guests on to talk through 2030 and highlight some other challenges, highlight ways to prepare. But we haven’t changed our mind on 2030, especially from the national debt variable of that equation, which just continues to, unfortunately for the economy, provide support for this downturn happening. Fortunately for us, it makes us more confident. And while I’m not rooting for the demise of the US in any way, we do like to be right at ITR, so there is a little bit of an element to that. So again, the national debt picture since President Trump has taken office is still one that’s concerning to us. And I’m not blaming President Trump. I’m really blaming every politician we’ve had since the mid 1970s where this has continued to be an increasing problem.

Again, we’ve got a lot of good 2030 content to come. Here at ITR, we are starting to pivot, since we’re only about four years away from this event, to what can we do to prepare our self personally and our businesses so we can thrive during the 2030s? Downturns don’t always have to be scary, but we’re still pretty confident in this one. Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of TrendsTalk. Hope you found this information helpful. Please like and subscribe to TrendsTalk wherever you listen to your podcasts. Look forward to seeing you all in the next one. Thanks so much. Take care for now.