Interest payments on the debt are now so large that the spending is higher than the outlays for the Departments of Defense, Commerce, Homeland Security, Education, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Small Business Administration, and the U.S. Coronavirus Refundable Credits scheme—combined.
Can an economist chime in here and explain how this works?
Debt of the issuer of a national currency (among other things) doesn’t quite work the same way as it does for ordinary participants of the economy… but I can’t quite figure out what that actually means.