Figures of Interest

How scared should you be?

Federal Interest Payments. Gray bars mark recessions.

Let’s get real:

• Social Security

• Medicare

• Medicaid

• Defense

• Interest

These are the drivers of the federal budget. Slashing other programs and firing federal workers is tinkering at the margins in a maximally disruptive way. Which is surely the real point of all of it: an attack designed to tear down the liberal managerial state rather than solve a fiscal crisis that’s barreling toward all of us regardless of our politics. (As if fentanyl at the border is really the reason for tariffs against Canada and Mexico.) The conversations we should be having involve raising the retirement age (and the yearly wage cap after which Social Security no longer gets taxed), how much sense aircraft carriers make in an age of drones, and the fact that interest payments alone will be over $1 trillion next fiscal year in a national debt that is currently $36 trillion and poised to balloon by another $14 trillion in the next decade—$3 billion a day, now more than the defense budget—eating up half of national revenues by 2050. (A good source for this data is the non-partisan Peter Peterson Foundation website.) We’re blowing past debt levels last seen in World War II—in peacetime. God help us when war breaks out.

In such a context, talking about tax cuts is ridiculous. So is talking about a progressive expansion of entitlements of any kind. The longer we put off getting our fiscal house in order the more painful it will be. Is any politician willing to talk frankly about this? Can any politician afford to? I fear the day eggs will be unavailable at any price, when electricity will be available a few hours a day. Maybe it makes sense to cross that bridge when we come to it. Maybe people like me are hopelessly misguided. I sincerely hope so.