America’s Debt Crisis Is Getting Too Big to Solve
There’s a reason politicians don’t talk about the budget deficit: The tax increases and/or spending cuts needed to control it are too enormous to contemplate.
Nobody wants to take on Godzilla.
Photographer: Embassy Pictures/Getty Images
Fiscal conservatism has more or less vanished from America’s political landscape. Government borrowing, despite the strong economy, continues to push public debt to record levels – and the presidential contenders and their parties say scarcely a word about it. To the extent they discuss economic policy at all, their intentions on taxes and public spending would make the fiscal outlook even worse. The issue can be ignored for only so long. Sooner or later, it will kick the economy in the teeth.
That much should be obvious to anybody who glances at the most recent fiscal projections. In one way, though, the picture is even worse than the forecasts suggest. They disguise the rapidly escalating difficulty of solving the problem if the fixes keep getting postponed. “Yes it’s a problem and eventually we’ll get around to it” involves the fallacy that no matter how big the debt gets, it will submit to feasible remedial action. Not necessarily. A point is reached – and might not be far off – where the only feasible “remedy” is catastrophic.