OPINION | EDITORIAL: Another day older and...

Did anybody think we could get this deep in debt?

It was a pleasure to read the letters section yesterday. Not wholly a pleasure, for that was Paul's line to his letter writers. Everything reminds us of a Paul Greenberg-ism this week. (Although we do remember one of his best columns, from 2008, in which he admitted to borrowing/stealing the phrase "It was wholly a pleasure" from James Branch Cabell. Maybe one day we'll get around to republishing Mr. G's best columns on this page. That should fill enough space to get us to 2025.)

One letter from yesterday's paper was a delight to read. It came from Deborah Johnson, of the Batesville Johnsons. Our writer/stringer/friend of the paper suggested that anybody running for public office should first show the paperwork for a completed course in economics. Or as Ms. Johnson put it: "If they study hard, they would learn that there is no such thing as government money--it is taken from hard-working taxpayers. They might even learn what every housewife already knows--that you can't spend more money than you make for very long before you go bankrupt."

Hear, hear! And, this being 2020, we'd add househusbands to her thought. There are a lot more about these days, even as the pandemic winds down.

The United States government is setting records all around, and we don't mean in a good way. The Associated Press is good about keeping up with the budget deficit, and that wire service came through again this week: "The U.S. government's budget deficit surged to an all-time high of $1.7 trillion for the first six months of the current budget year, nearly double the previous record, as another round of economic-support checks added billions of dollars to spending last month."

Yes, economic support has been important in the last 13 months. And in emergencies, such as a pandemic, only Grinches would be against economic support for those who need it. But the AP story also said this about the latest stimulus package by the President Biden administration: "Biden's package included individual support payments of up to $1,400, and the administration rushed to make those payments as soon as the president signed the measure into law. The Treasury Department statement showed that the payments in March totaled $339 billion."

Now, $339 billion is a ton of money. But what it isn't, is $1.7 trillion. Not all of this new government spending is economic support for people in need.

For the considerable record, many of us made these points during the last administration, too: Yearly deficits of this magnitude are unsustainable. The country won't be able to "grow out" of it, as economists used to say during the Reagan-deficit years.

If the law of supply and demand really does work every time, then the number of these dollars floating around will bring inflation one day. And your 401(k)s/IRAs/savings will be worth less. The train is coming. And no telling how all that will affect the kids. Will they have their own version of the 1970s, with bell bottoms, mood rings, stagflation, and a string of failed presidencies?

Again, from our friends at the AP: "Last year's deficit, for the budget year that ended Sept. 30, totaled a record $3.1 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in February that this fiscal year's deficit would total $2.3 trillion. But that estimate did not include the cost of Biden's $1.9 trillion rescue plan that Congress passed in March or the impact of the administration's infrastructure proposal that Congress is considering now."

How long can the day of reckoning be put off? How long before the road to serfdom ends, and Americans look around and, being out of pavement, notice that they've arrived? And nickels cost 50 cents?

Richard Feynman, theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate, studied weird stuff like "the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium," among other things. (A lot of math was involved.) But he couldn't get his mind around what Americans were doing to themselves in the 1980s: "There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers."

Some experts say running such high deficits now isn't so bad because interest rates are low. Even if we give them that, interest rates won't always be this low. And one day paying just the interest on this debt will be enough to crowd out social programs and national security spending. When that happens, maybe Paul Krugman will explain how it all happened. We could help him with opinion archives.

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