Peter Schiff:  Interest Payments Are Devouring the Budget

On Thursday’s episode of the Peter Schiff Show, Peter (joined by a special guest, Schiff Sovereign’s James Hickman) argues that the federal budget is no longer driven by programs so much as by the mounting costs of debt maintenance. The duo covers the headline $37 trillion public debt, how interest has become a mandatory line item that crowds out everything else, and why the Federal Reserve’s interventions risk turning mounting deficits into accelerating inflation — all reasons, they say, to be ever-skeptical of fiat money.

James starts by laying out the raw numbers and why they matter for everyday policy decisions:

Look, I’ve been writing about this for a while. I’ve been talking about this for a while. The United States just recently hit $37 trillion in debt. And that’s just the nominal public debt that doesn’t include the unfunded liabilities and all the other things, the Social Security shortfall, the Medicare shortfall, all the other things—just the gross nominal public debt, $37 trillion. More importantly, the spending, the gross interest cost this fiscal year alone, which is going to end at the end of next month, September 30, 2025, is going to come in at about $1.2 trillion.