The Congressional Budget Office has issued yet another warning about the federal government‘s head-first acceleration into impending fiscal crisis, not that anyone in either party seems to care much.

Following the CBO’s announcement that net interest payments on the national debt are up a whopping 42% from this point in the last fiscal year, the nonpartisan analysts now predict that total interest payments will amount to 3.1% of our annual economic output for this year. By next year, the CBO projects net interest payments will amount to 3.4% of gross domestic product, greater than any other share in recorded history.

And consider the last time when deficit spending even came close to what we’re spending today. During World War II, when the United States had to expand its deficit to a full quarter of annual GDP to defeat the literal Nazis, the debt-to-GDP ratio topped out at nearly 119%. Within the next decade, with no wars or recessions in the American midst, the CBO projects that the debt-to-GDP ratio will skyrocket to 122%. The deficit will then amount to nearly 7% of annual economic output, per the CBO’s projection.

Mind you, the CBO’s estimates operate under wildly optimistic assumptions that mean these likely underestimate the scope of the problem. The CBO assumes that the interest rates on federal debt will hold roughly constant around 3.5% throughout the decade and that nominal economic will average 3.8% — inflation, in this perhaps delusion assumption, will quickly return to the Federal Reserve’s 2% maximum target. But consider that the interest rate on federal debt has more than doubled in the last two years alone, from 1.6% in mid-2022 to 3.27% as of this past May. And while the Fed has been thankfully unyielding in its monetary tightening, White House fiscal policy is diametrically opposed. Congressional inaction and inability from Republicans in particular are obviously allowing entitlements to race toward insolvency in the next decade, but President Joe Biden is unilaterally exacerbating the problem with his continued and repeated cancellation and “reform,” which acts as a de facto cancellation of student loan debt that amount to hundreds of billions of dollars of defaults to the Treasury.

In a separate report, the CBO has considered the possibility that “larger deficits, less investment and capital, and additional increases in interest rates” lead the interest rate on federal debt to average around 5.8% through 2054. In that case, the national debt would reach 217% of GDP by 2054 instead of the 166% in the baseline.

As always, the problem is not insufficient taxation: Government revenue now amounts to 18% of our GDP, higher than the 17.3% average across the past half a century. The problem is and always has been spending and projected spending.

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While federal outlays were equivalent to 21% of GDP in the prior 50 years, government spending will reach a quarter of our total economic output this year. And while discretionary spending has fallen as a share of GDP and is projected to continue to fall, mandatory spending is set to rise to 15.3% of GDP by 2034 and net interest payments to 4.1% of GDP.

Taxes definitely cannot be raised without capping the economic growth required to overcome perennially raised interest rates, and they arguably should be decreased to historical averages. But the real crisis is, as it always has been, a Capitol addicted to spending.