Interest Payments as a Percentage of Tax Revenues

This page is created to monitor the U.S. Interest Payments as a Percentage of Tax Revenues.

One metric that the U.S. government can never manipulate is this ratio. You can apply hedonic adjustments to inflation numbers, you can calculate GDP differently, but you can't falsify the amount of interest payments on government debt and you can't falsify tax revenues.

This ratio measures the affordability of government debt. A spike upwards means that the country is having difficulties servicing its debt load. This can have many causes, like higher yields on bonds, higher public debt or lower tax revenues.

As U.S. debt goes up and bond yields rise, interest payments will rise.

 

Interest payments as a % of total U.S. debt have bottomed out (red line). It is projected that in 2030, you'll be paying 2 trillion interest on 40 trillion debt per year. The red chart is correlated to bond yields. Bonds are called trashuries for a reason.