Peter Suderman
It is obvious at this point that
Republicans, on the whole, do not care about debt or deficits—at least
not in any substantive sense. That's not just an economic problem. It's a
political problem that is increasing the risk of a debt crisis in the
future.
Although the GOP
spent the better part of Barack Obama's presidency complaining bitterly
about the trillion-dollar budget gaps the country ran during his first
term, and President Trump promised on the campaign trail to eliminate
all federal debt, deficits have increased even faster than expected
under his watch, and total federal debt has risen accordingly. And that,
in turn, is likely to have long-term consequences for both the economy
and for the broader politics of debt and deficits.
You can see the nation's trajectory spelled out in painstaking detail in the Congressional Budget Office's annual budget outlook, released yesterday.
Not
only does it show that the trillion-dollar deficits that followed the
financial crisis have returned, it projects that deficits of that size
are expected to be a fixture throughout the coming decade. Indeed, the
next decade's deficits are now expected to be $160 billion higher, all
together, than was projected as recently as last August. We are entering
an era of permanent trillion-dollar deficits.
By 2030, CBO projects the deficit—the
annual gap between spending and revenues—will reach $1.7 trillion, which
is roughly the size of the entire
federal budget in 1999. Rising debt and deficits, the budget office
predicts, will coincide with slowing economic growth, dropping from 2.2
percent this year to 1.5 percent a decade from now.
The
federal government will be borrowing more, and the economy will be
expanding at a slower pace. It may not be an immediate economic crisis,
but we are spending and borrowing ourselves into stagnancy and decline.
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