National debt: Their plan is Keynes’ ‘long run’

Thirty-five trillion.

Wow, that’s a really, really big number — big enough that it deserves my exploitation of it as the entire opening paragraph of this column.

OK, so add “dollars” after that really, really big number if you must, or put a dollar sign before it, as in “on July 26, the U.S. national debt passed the $35 trillion mark.”

That feels like a real milestone — around $7 trillion more than last year’s gross domestic product, which supposedly represents the value of all goods and services produced in the U.S.  — but it didn’t generate nearly as much panicked media notice as I’d expected it to.

Maybe the American press is a bit distracted by the weirdest presidential campaign season in decades (and that’s saying something!).

Or maybe the national debt has just grown so large, and its growth accelerated to such speeds, that it’s become the usual and really only merits the “footnote and yawn” treatment these days.

I’m old enough to remember when American politicians engaged in vigorous public hand-wringing about their debt (all the while, of course, pretending it was your debt), occasionally even tinkering with tiny spending cuts or not-so-tiny tax hikes to “do something” about it.

Those days are long gone. “If we don’t raise the debt ceiling and borrow more money, the world will end!” is the new “if we don’t stop spending more than we bring in, we’re screwed!” Perhaps that’s because the politicians kept spending more than they brought in until the screwing became inevitable.

Personally, I think they’ve taken an often misinterpreted quote from a long-dead economist to heart and turned it into their plan of action.

“The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs,” John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1923. “In the long run, we are all dead.”

Keynes meant that as a call for vigorous short-term economic action on the part of government in times of crisis, as opposed to waiting for the ship to right itself over a longer time frame.

Today’s politicians treat it instead as permission to spend like drunken sailors on shore leave and hope they’re dead — or at least retired — before the bills come due and the ship goes down.

And, make no mistake, it will go down. The politicians will eventually default on their debt, either openly or with accounting tricks … and do their damnedest to stick you with most of the negative consequences.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism ( thegarrisoncenter.org ). He lives and works in north-central Florida.

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