They made the mess and here we the people have to clean up

when I was a freshman in high school, our history/economics teachers told us the national debt was $3 trillion, which he said at the time was an amount that could never be paid off no matter how much they cut spending or raised taxes. nobody in our class had even heard the word “billion” and would not have had the slightest clue what a “trillion” was. they’ve continued making bad decisions for the past 3 decades and the debt is now 10 times what it was in 1990. we have over 10 million slugs on disability. that’s the population of the country of Sweden. this doesn’t even include state debt, city debt or the debts individuals have.

Who’s foult it is??? Every senator has 18 aids. Does he need that many? NO

We got productivity gains like no other time in history from computers, internet, mass marketing and data analytics during that time and the real spending power of the bottom half of the income ladder got poorer while being priced out of education and real estate. We had 2 decades of stimulus in the form of QE and 0% interest and still, people can’t afford healthcare, homes, and now food too. Inflation is lagging indicator, and it doesn’t point out mitigating factors like one-time productivity boosts like the advent of smartphones. The gap in between wealth and poverty and the volume of hours worked while travelling and on call out of the office should have been making those workers richer all else being equal – but it’s not “all else equal”, though, because the national debt is money spent lining certain people’s war chests and offshore accounts. National debt is fine when the benefits are spent on the people collectively, because then benefits and costs break even (usually with more upside due to economies of scale), but when Musk, Bezos, Gates, Zuck, etc “earn” more money than most countries, it kind of makes you wonder how if a country’s debt is supposedly good for it then why aren’t billionaires operating on personal annual deficits too?
Answer: because overspending and under collecting is a childishly stupid way to manage a growing pool of money.
What this piece’s author fails to grasp is just because a bubble hasn’t burst does not infer there is no bubble. Some things take decades to unravel, like consequences of national policy. Plenty of military strategists told Putin the war in Ukraine would be days, someone told Hitler he could take over the world, and USA believe Iraq would be an in-and-out kind of affair. The consequences are felt long after we even realized how badly we goofed. Here’s the thing, we engineer inflation so we can borrow today and repay it for cheaper later. That’s the whole theory behind debt being stimulative in a nutshell, but that also means the person buying that debt will demand a premium to compensate for that future value because they’re not stupid either, they don’t want to break even on purchasing power for the risk they’re taking, that’s not how debt is bought either. Debt is bought to make the lender money so if the borrower is depreciating value in the currency in order to make servicing their debt cheaper then there will only be a buyer of debt if the real value of the loan revenues is anticipated to outpace depreciation for both parties – the debtor wants something now rather than later because the time they’d otherwise wait is more costly and the lender wants an ROI which exceeds forecast future value. The price of debt is the balance.

As a CPA, I’ll just say that running a deficit like we do just means we don’t tax enough for the amount of spending we have. We either need to raise taxes or cut spending, or some combination of both. Otherwise, we have to run a deficit by issuing more debt which kicks the can down the road to future generations. And as the debt grows the cost of servicing the debt (making payments on it) will continue to take up larger and larger portions of government spending, and with that, will require higher taxes for future generations.

Imagine being so bad with money that you can steal 40% of people’s income and still end up in 33 trillion dollars of debt.