Opinion | Americans are foolishly ignoring the threat of a debt crisis – By Noah Rothman (MSNBC) / Oct 9, 2022
With the national debt now over $31 trillion, the U.S. needs to put its fiscal house in order — before things take a turn for the worse.
Upon the news this week that America’s gross national debt now exceeds $31 trillion, Jason Furman, former director of the National Economic Council under Barack Obama, told The New York Times, “We were sort of at the edge of ‘OK’ before, and we are past ‘OK’ now. The deficit path is almost certainly too high.”
While Furman is rightly alarmed, you can practically taste the public’s profound ambivalence. For decades, the growing national debt has been the esoteric preoccupation of auditors and monetarist conservatives (who are themselves an endangered species within the increasingly populist Republican coalition).
The lack of concern is a luxury, and luxuries are available only to those who can afford them. As long as interest rates were low and the U.S. dollar remained the world’s prohibitive reserve currency, Americans could afford to avoid worrying about the balance on the national credit card. But those conditions are changing, and our assumptions must change with them.
