If stabilizing debt seems hard, that’s only because given our deeply divided politics, even modest steps toward responsibility are extremely hard to take.
And by deeply divided politics I mostly mean Republicans, who declaim the evils of debt while pursuing policies that put long-run fiscal sustainability even farther out of reach.
Fucking. Thank you. The debt is only a problem because some people won't be reasonable.
Krugman is usually wrong, but even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day. The national debt is a scare tactic to block spending on things the working class wants while still allowing almost unlimited spending on the things the capitalist class wants.
Here’s what the national debt is: All the US dollars the federal government has created out of thin air by spending minus all the US dollars it has destroyed by taxing. That’s it. If the federal government had no debt, then there wouldn’t be any money, because federal spending is where the US dollars come from in the first place†.
†Actually much of the money comes from US private banks, which the Federal government has deputized to create money out of thin air in the form of loans. But for every loan “credit” dollar a bank creates, it also creates one loan “debt” dollar, so in the end, once the principal is paid off, those dollars cancel each other out.