Two warnings late this week on federal government debt , one from a Democrat and one from a Republican, deserve a wider audience and a constructive response from everyone in federal elective office.

On Thursday, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia blasted President Joe Biden for being nearly a month late (and counting) in meeting the legal deadline for submitting a budget and criticized both parties for pushing the debt so high, so fast.

On Saturday, Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley pounded home an anti-debt message to a Florida meeting of the Club for Growth, a right-wing group that donates money for intra-party Republican primary fights.

Both Manchin and Haley are right.

“President Trump added an estimated $7.5 trillion to projected debt levels from legislation and executive orders, including $4 trillion not related to COVID,” Manchin said on the Senate floor. “President Biden has added more than $5 trillion to projected debt levels from legislation and executive orders, including more than $2.5 trillion not related to COVID.”

Manchin also said: "My Democratic friends don’t want to say a word about our out-of-control spending and are outright refusing to even talk to Republicans about reasonable, responsible reforms. They want to pass a 'clean' debt ceiling bill without a commitment to fix anything. My Republican friends refuse to offer any specifics, and some have recklessly threatened default, which is something that absolutely has to be off the table.”

As for Haley, she introduced the topic this way: “We’re living through an unprecedented expansion of the welfare state. Ninety million people on Medicaid … Forty-two million people on food stamps. Since the moment COVID hit, we’ve spent trillions paying people to sit on the couch. This president, and his party, apparently looked at the failing economies of Europe and said, ‘yea, let’s do that.’ It’s un-American. And it doesn’t have to be this way.”

Haley, too, offered stark numbers: “We’ve never come close to spending and wasting this much taxpayer money. When I was elected Governor [of South Carolina, in 2010], the national debt stood at $13 trillion. Thirteen years later, we’re at more than $31 trillion. And because of Joe Biden, we’ll add $20 trillion more to the national debt in the next 10 years. Our children will never forgive us for this.”

Those numbers are so big that sometimes context can be lost. One way many economists measure the danger of national debt is by comparing it to the size of the nation’s overall economy. A fiscally healthy country would keep its debt, or at least its debt held by the public (rather than by other parts of the government), below 50%, or certainly below 60%, of the economy’s size as measured by gross domestic product. Anything above 100% means the economy is in a major danger zone.

Well, just 15 years ago, the total U.S. federal debt held by the public amounted to less than 40% of GDP . Now it sits right at 100%. And this official U.S. debt does not even include unfunded future liabilities, which more than triple the burden on future generations and on the full faith and credit of the U.S. government.

Failure of both sides, especially the Democrats but also former President Trump and his Republican acolytes, to take any serious actions to rein in debt amounts to near-criminal levels of dereliction of duty. Prominent politicians such as Manchin and Haley are to be commended for emphasizing the issue. Now let’s see them — especially Manchin, whose deal with Biden last year seriously exacerbated the problem — along with others, propose some real solutions .