There is a pernicious and persistent pattern among many partisan pundits and politicians, pertaining to public debt. When their own party is in power, they minimize or ignore the problem, but as soon as the other guys win the presidency, they start shouting that the debtpocalypse is upon us.
Do I follow this pattern? Maybe a little bit. As recently as 2022, in Biden’s second year as President, I was not very worried about U.S. government debt. My reasoning was that A) interest rates were going to go back down after the surge in inflation had ebbed, preventing borrowing costs from getting severe, and B) Biden-era inflation had eroded some of the government’s debt burden.
But I still warned that there was some limit to government borrowing — eventually, at some difficult-to-predict point in time, too much debt would cause first interest rates and then inflation to soar. And I warned against listening to “fiscal arsonists” like the MMT folks, who aggressively advocated for higher government deficits.
And by 2023 — still under Biden! — I was starting to worry a lot more. Interest rates weren’t coming down much, making austerity more necessary — except no one, including Democrats, was talking about austerity. And by 2024 — still under Biden! — I was warning that there was no good reason for all the deficit spending we were still doing, and that continuing on our current path would run the risk of spiraling inflation:
So I definitely didn’t wait until Trump came to power to start worrying about the debt. But I do admit that under Trump, my worries have intensified. The Democrats listen to intellectuals — although the party has become more dominated by progressives who tend to worry less about government debt, there was always the possibility that concerted shouting by pundits like myself could shift the consensus among left-leaning think-tankers and staffers, who could then pivot the Dems back to the fiscal austerity of the Bill Clinton years.
Republicans — especially Trump and his movement — are a different beast entirely. They stopped listening to egghead intellectuals a long time ago, and even the finance-industry and right-wing think-tank types who have some residual impulse toward fiscal hawkishness have steadily lost influence as MAGA heads toward full cult-of-personality status. The only person in the Trump orbit who even talked about fiscal hawkery was Elon Musk, but this glimmer of hope faded when DOGE utterly failed to reduce government spending:
