Scott Horton says interest on the national debt has grown so large that it now takes a bigger share of the annual government budget than the military. He said the United States is spending more on interest than on defense, a shift he framed as a warning about where the country's money is going.
“If you look at the chart now interest on the national debt is now a larger percentage of the annual national government’s budget than even the world empire the iron triangle,” Horton said. “We spend even more than that on interest on the debt.”
Horton, the editorial director of Antiwar.com and the director of the Libertarian Institute, has spent years making the case against U.S. military intervention. His Scott Horton Show has featured more than 6,000 foreign policy interviews since 2003, giving him a platform that has often tied foreign policy to the cost of government borrowing and the price households pay for it.
He said media figures and arms manufacturers have a stake in keeping conflict alive. “They always have a huge interest in not just hyping up what’s going on in the moment but in helping to make sure that there’s a violent conflict to cover for the next quarter,” Horton said. That argument sits at the center of his broader critique: war is not only costly on the battlefield, but expensive in the budget and profitable for the people narrating it.
Horton also linked inflation to the squeeze on ordinary workers. “The cost of living is up because of monetary inflation and therefore massive price inflation that has just destroyed the price of living for people,” he said. “Those wages go up last after all the other prices adjust.” He argued that lower-wage earners are hit hardest because they feel price increases before paychecks catch up, if they catch up at all.
That is where his case lands today. In his telling, the pressure on households is not an isolated problem but part of a chain that starts with government debt, runs through inflation and ends with workers trying to keep up. “The greedy employees everywhere keep demanding raises to try to keep up with the price of you know the price of everything else which is getting it completely backwards and wrong and blaming the victims for the problem,” Horton said.
The broader story, then, is not just that interest costs are rising. It is that they are now competing with military spending for the largest slice of the budget, while households face the downstream effects in prices and wages. For Horton, that makes the government’s fiscal path and its foreign-policy habits part of the same problem, not separate ones.
