Two year debt cycle

 In 2023, the US debt hit a limit of about $31.4 trillion, and this was finally raised on 6/2/23.  In 2025, the US debt hit a limit of about $36.2 trillion and this was finally raised on 7/3/25.  So there is a cycle which is two years and one month. 

For just the debt to the public portion, it was about $24.5 trillion on 1/3/23, and it hit $25.0 trillion on 6/5/23.  In 2025, it was $28.8 trillion on 1/2/25, and it hit $29.0 trillion on 7/1/25.  So the numbers are almost exactly $4 trillion apart, with a delay of two years and one month.

I don't need to check it every day, but today is July 9, 2025 and the debt to the public is $29.2 trillion as of 7/7/25.  What was it on 6/7/23?   $25.0 trillion - so I am a little bit off.  But it was $25.2 trillion on 6/20/23.  So I would say that there is a parallel between 6/20/23 and 7/7/25.  I expect the parallel tracks to continue for a while and will note on this in the future.  It will probably diverge at some point, but until then there are certain parallels with events that happened about two years ago.  You could probably see this better on a graph, but I don't have time to do that right now.

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The cycle goes back even further than that.  On 12/28/21, the debt to the public first hit $23 trillion.  About two years and one month later, on 1/23/24, it first hit $27 trillion.  The 2021 numbers don't exactly match because the debt ceiling was frozen between about July and December 2021.  But it is still possible to see the pattern a little.  The debt to the public was $21.2 trillion on 11/16/2020.  This is about 2 years and 8 months before 6/20/23, so this is way off.  But because this matches the pattern better later, I will start including it.  So the parallel dates, from a fiscal perspective are 11/16/20, 6/20/23 and 7/7/25.

I really think there is a cycle here and I will check this again frequently, at least every half trillion increase.

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Does the pattern go back even further?  In 2019, there was also a similar debt ceiling freeze that unthawed about 8/1/2019.  If you use a $5 trillion gap then this almost matches.  (The extra trillion was because of a little thing called Covid-19). When was the debt at $16.2 trillion?  On 7/1/19, which is about 6 years ago.

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What about the future?  We can predict this fairly accurately in the short-term.  The CBO spends a lot of time making forecasts, and I take those and modify them.  There is expected to be about a $2 trillion deficit per year at least for the 3 years.  So we should see debt to the public of $33.2 trillion on about 7/9/2027.  The fact that this pattern exists gives me greater confidence that we can keep this sucker afloat (as Dubya might say).