Is national debt too big for Congress to worry about?

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

By Clive Crook / Bloomberg Opinion

It’s hard to think intelligently about public debt and deficits. The economics of fiscal policy is complicated and defies straightforward prescriptions. What’s most striking about budget-making in Washington today, though, is not that legislators are confused about what good debt-management requires. It’s that they’ve just stopped thinking about it.

If passed by the Senate, last week’s vast House budget bill would add between $3 trillion and $5 trillion to deficits over the next 10 years. Yet the plan hasn’t divided the country’s politicians according to whether it’s fiscally reckless. Nowadays, that issue rarely comes up. All that matters is who gains and who loses from the proposed changes to taxes and spending. Whether the economy is heading for fiscal breakdown isn’t Washington’s concern.

In 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney famously said deficits don’t matter, noting that the national debt soared during Ronald Reagan’s time in office (from 21 percent of GDP to 35 percent) as the economy boomed. Conscientious fiscal neglect, as one might call it, is nothing new. The difference is that Cheney’s comment was provocative and meant to be: It drew attention and was argued over. Not any longer. Nobody in Congress or the White House thinks it necessary to insist that deficits don’t matter. They’ve simply stopped caring.

This suspension of fiscal anxiety might seem puzzling. Perhaps the public debt is now so big, and on such a fast-rising trajectory, that bringing it back under control seems impossibly difficult. A politician might therefore ask, why worry about it? Without this bill, debt was already on track to exceed 150 percent of gross domestic product by 2055. But there’s no politically feasible way to rein it in. So why not cut taxes by another few trillion dollars over the next 10 years? Sure, this will raise the debt by another 10 percentage points, but the debt was “unsustainable” anyway, so what’s your point?

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-is-national-debt-too-big-for-congress-to-worry-about/

[LymphocyteLover]

1. It's truly maddening!

fucking Republicans are just shitting all over our future-- and do not care, because the debt was manageable with reasonable debt control like Dems typically do plus lapse of the trump tax cuts, but this bill if it goes into law will truly bring us closer to insolvency and a serious economic collapse. They are completely delusional that tax cuts will pay for themselves.