national debt

When it comes to cutting deficits, don't play small ball.

A small, bipartisan group of lawmakers will be hunkering down this fall, negotiating ways to reduce deficits by at least $1.2 trillion over the next decade.

It's easy to read the latest budget outlook from the Congressional Budget Office as further proof that the United States really needs to get serious about dealing with the national debt.

As lawmakers continued to butt heads over how much spending should be cut over the next seven months, a few senators on Tuesday were trying to keep the focus where they think it belongs -- the next several decades.

The longer Congress waits to raise the debt ceiling, the more time and money the Treasury Department will have to spend just managing the national debt by the minute, a federal report warned Tuesday.

Commentary: Maya MacGuineas is the director of the fiscal policy program at the New America Foundation.

Interest payments on the national debt could total $5.5 trillion over the next decade, or about 79% of the new debt estimated to accrue between 2012 and 2021.

Last summer President Obama promised to call the bluff of anyone who talks a good game on reducing the national debt but doesn't act.

Adding another trillion to the national debt tells the world the US doesn't intend to pay its bills. We're following the course of the great Spanish empire -- which went bankrupt.

Get ready for some heated rhetoric about how to contain the unsustainable national debt.