Trump and Harris Have Ignored a Looming Crisis
Good government requires fiscal control. Neither candidate knows what it means.
Who’s counting?
Photographer: Adek Berry/AFP/Getty Images
This election can hardly be faulted for lack of energy or commitment: The candidates have made it a contest of competing catastrophisms, with the survival of democracy itself at stake. Fighting over these existential issues, they’ve managed to agree on only one thing — that humdrum norms of competent governance are for now beside the point.
One of those norms is fiscal responsibility. Sooner or later, governments that set this concern aside come to grief regardless of their other commitments. When that happens, they take their economies down with them. The prospect is no longer unthinkable for the US. Yet it’s hard to recall an election that ignored the issue so totally or in which pandering on taxes and public spending was so unrestrained.