By the time you read this, the U.S. federal debt will have passed $35,000,000,000,000. (Call it $35 trillion if you like; I prefer thirty-five thousand billion). Last week, the Social Security and Medicare Trustees released their annual reports showing how both programs are barreling toward insolvency.
And in its May financial statement, the U.S. Treasury announced that interest payments in the first seven months of the fiscal year exceeded each of defense spending, Medicare and Medicaid.
It has been, by any measure, a rough couple of weeks for anyone who cares about fiscal sanity.
But aside from a handful of fiscally conservative groups (yes, a couple of those still soldier on), nobody seemed to care. Certainly, there was the occasional member of Congress who tweeted out something. But even the leading financial media outlets quickly moved on to what they must have considered bigger stories of the day.
After all, Stormy Daniels was testifying.
It’s actually easy to explain why so few people care about the current fiscal situation. It isn’t because the issues are really that difficult to understand. Most people deal with debt in their own lives. They have good debt (mortgages), bad debt (credit cards) and debt that is something in between (car loans). But they get it. They know what it means when your minimum credit card payment starts to get bigger than, say, what you spend on food.
Even Social Security isn’t intellectually unapproachable. We’ve been living off regular “income” (payroll taxes) plus savings (the trust fund balances) for the last 40 years. When the savings runs out, we will have only the income, which means we will have to spend a lot less.
So, while the numbers may be literally incomprehensible, (most disturbingly to the people who vote to spend it) the concepts are accessible to just about everybody.
It isn’t the complexity, then, that drives people to stick their heads in the sand. It is the politics. And that goes for both parties, albeit for different reasons.
Some Democrats do care about the debt. All of them probably care about the sustainability of Social Security and Medicare. But spending less on anything — with the possible exception of defense for some of the most progressive — is counter to their DNA. They have been telling people for decades that the government’s deficit problem is caused by rich people not paying their fair share. It would be extraordinarily difficult for them to admit that they’ve been wrong this whole time.
Republicans care about Social Security and Medicare much more than Democrats give them credit for. But while some of them do care about out-of-control spending, most of them like spending as much as Democrats do. They just like to do it on other things.
Thus, most compromises in Washington play out like this: Group A wants to spend $100 on its priorities, Group B wants to spend $100 on their own, so they “compromise” and spend $300 on both. Don’t believe me? Go look at the history of the foreign aid bill that just recently passed.
So, when Democrats talk about “fixing” things, it is usually with an eye toward only the revenue side of the equation. Thus, in campaign parlance: “soaking the rich” as part of the “politics of envy.” And when Republicans take on the issue, they focus almost exclusively on the spending side. Thus, “hating the poor.”
Easy campaign attack ads there. It might win an election or two. But it doesn’t solve the problem.
That political dynamic is why the much-hyped congressional debt commission seems unlikely to come into being. Democrats won’t vote for it without guarantees that Social Security benefits will be sacrosanct; Republicans won’t vote for it without taking tax-hikes off the table.
The politics also plays a role in the voting booth, as most voters seem to want more spending, not less. As one Republican told Donald Trump while trashing my proposed budget in 2017, “No one has ever lost their job in this town for spending too much money. They have lost it for not spending enough.”
He was right about that.
Even the private sector — and the people who should know better about the math — shares some blame. The same captains of industry who are now calling for fiscal restraint were once the loudest voices for bailouts, stimulus and subsidies.
Being a fiscal hawk in Washington has never been easy. Saying “yes” to people is always easier than saying “no.” And certainly, the small group of resident Scrooges on the Hill have looked less like disciplined economic analysts in the recent past and more like homeless guys, standing on the corner holding handmade signs reading, “The end is near!”
And to tell you the truth, fiscal conservatives in this town have felt like they’re playing that role for quite some time.
What really should frighten everyone is that, sooner or later, just like the guy on the corner with the sign, we are going to be right.
Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman from South Carolina, is a contributor to NewsNation. He served as director of the Office of Management and Budget, acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and White House chief of staff under President Donald Trump.