America’s Broken Politics Are Dragging It Down a Fiscal Black Hole

Few any longer dispute that America’s public debt is growing unsustainably and that, sooner or later, the task of reining it in will be unavoidable. Oddly, this presumption of inevitability has bred a kind of complacency. In the end, whether we like it or not, the problem will have to be solved. Therefore, it will be solved. So what’s the hurry?

The answer is that further delay makes an orderly solution harder to envisage. Eventually a point will come where a well-planned remedy is impossible, because the fiscal adjustments would crash the economy. At that point, the only remedy will be default, explicit or by means of high inflation. Americans need to take this disturbing prospect much more seriously. The problem is already so intractable — structurally intractable, you might say — that workable answers have become harder to imagine than outright fiscal collapse.