How I learned to start worrying and hate the deficit

It's time for liberals to wake up about the national debt

Photo caption: A deficit hawk (OK, OK it’s an osprey, but those are commonly called fish hawks). (Illustration by Isabella Pereira for The Argument. Photos by Vicki Jauron/Babylon and Beyond Photography/Getty Images; Pakin Songmor/Getty Images; and Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Lately, I’ve found myself settling into a very Washington, D.C., sort of middle age.

Some of it is normal, 39-year-old dad stuff. I’ve had to cut back on running for the sake of my knees; I’ve joined a local whiskey club; I’m popping minoxidil to try to salvage my hairline.

But I’ve been feeling the telltale pangs of midlife in my job as a policy journalist, too. Above all: I am starting to care a lot about the national debt.

I know. It’s a little like saying you’ve grown a sudden interest in World War II history or that pop music just doesn’t hit like it used to. “Guy nears 40 and starts worrying about debt-to-GDP ratios” is a tale as old as the Beltway.

It really was not always thus for me. I graduated college into the maw of the Great Recession and watched in frustration as Washington became prematurely consumed by deficit-reduction mania, despite the depressed state of our economy. (That video of Simpson-Bowles commission member Alice Rivlin doing the Harlem Shake is burned permanently into my brain.)

Back then, I eagerly argued that Japan’s ability to shoulder a vast national debt suggested that the U.S. wasn’t in any immediate danger (which it wasn’t), that government spending doesn’t really become a problem until it starts generating inflation (which was nowhere to be seen), and that anybody claiming the U.S. was about to face a crisis like Greece was economically illiterate (which they were).

One of my big fears about Biden in 2020 was that he’d too eagerly return to his old deficit-hawk ways when the economy was still fragile; my main hope in 2021 was that the old guy’s administration would ignore the haters and go big. (I got my wish, for better or worse.)

But times change and so do Treasury rates. The fact that interest payments on federal debt have doubled as a share of the economy is certainly fueling some of my new concern, as is the effect of watching Donald Trump grow the deficit by making mincemeat of the income tax. The bottom line is that, lately, I’ve been starting to feel anxious that, even if it’s decades from now, conservatives are going to successfully starve the beast, and we’ll find ourselves with a political choice between massive cuts to the welfare state or economic breakdown.

Liberals need to begin fighting back now, laying the groundwork to win the long-term cultural and policy battles that are secondary concerns at the moment — since democracy itself is in peril — but will very much matter down the line. And we need to do it in a way that advances our principles rather than compromises on them: emphasizing a patriotic duty to pay taxes, putting the country on a path to strong growth, and fighting hard against conservative crackdowns on immigration that will doom our demographics and our long-term finances with them.

Corny and washed up as it sounds, we need to be the deficit hawks.

---

Why does anyone fret about debt, anyway?