by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
NRO’s\u00a0The Corner<\/em><\/p>\n Amid all the fighting over healthcare, Obama’s new promises, the Israeli spat, the Frum controversy,\u00a0et al<\/em>., looms the national debt. We can ignore it; get angry at it and say, “What the hell, I’ll quadruple it!”; have our “experts” write sophistic treatises about how it either doesn’t matter or is in truth good; hear our politicians claim it is secondary to the passing of a “progressive” agenda; or secretly smile that its service will require higher taxes and more “redistributive change”; but in the end, what we as a nation collectively owe others and ourselves transcends politics.<\/p>\n Cranky 19th-century-minded farmers used to preach about the tentacles of low interest. Apparently they had this strange idea that when interest rates went too low, the uninformed mob-like masses borrowed too much \u2014 and the resulting live-for-today demand for cheap money forced the once-endless pool of ready loans to dry up and interest to rise \u2014 and a few smarter people were sticking around to profit when this cycle played out like clockwork.<\/p>\n In short, the United States is floating far more loans than ever before in peacetime, and for longer scheduled durations, because interest rates are only a quarter of what they have been in the past. But this theory that we can endlessly multiply the size of our debt because the service costs remain low and static is a prescription for disaster \u2014 like the credit-card introductory offer of 2 to 3 percent for 6 months that hooks the naive into charging thousands of dollars, only to end up without the means to service the debt when the rate climbs over 20 percent. For a technocracy that is Ivy League certified and brags about its competency, we have fallen into the age-old trap that snares the naive ARM house buyer, the teenaged MasterCard mega-borrower, and the “free” coupon holder who heads headlong to Vegas.<\/p>\n That we are borrowing now at cheap interest hundreds of billions for things that are unnecessary or counterproductive will only make it worse, psychologically, when we have to pay it all back with high interest. It reminds me of the boom-to-bust neighbor who bought his superfluous super-duper, hydra-headed, metallic red-painted hydraulic vine-cutter with easy farm loans in the late 1970s and, when headed for bankruptcy in the 1980s, looked at the now rusted, useless contraption in his barnyard and sighed to me, “And I’m still paying 17 percent on that sucker!”<\/p>\n \u00a92010 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson NRO’s\u00a0The Corner Amid all the fighting over healthcare, Obama’s new promises, the Israeli spat, the Frum controversy,\u00a0et al., looms the national debt. We can ignore it; get angry at it and say, “What the hell, I’ll quadruple it!”; have our “experts” write sophistic treatises about how it either doesn’t matter or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[608],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-sd","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":12398,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/victor-davis-hanson-the-spreading-debt-virus-5-potential-cures-for-30-trillion-problem\/","url_meta":{"origin":1749,"position":0},"title":"Victor Davis Hanson: The spreading debt virus \u2014 5 potential cures for $30 trillion problem","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 29, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Fox News The current\u00a0U.S. budget deficit\u00a0could soon exceed a record $4 trillion. 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But as a veteran of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "October 2009"","block_context":{"text":"October 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/october-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6645,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-democratic-disasters-to-come\/","url_meta":{"origin":1749,"position":5},"title":"The Democratic Disasters to Come","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 21, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0PJ Media\u00a0 The defunding wars are over. The accusations are fading. We are back to reality. Of course, America\u2019s long-term prospects, at least in comparison with other countries\u2019 futures \u2014 whether in terms of demography, military power, food-production constitutional stability, energy sources, or higher education \u2014\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "America's Future"","block_context":{"text":"America's Future","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/americas-future\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/3320771230_870c107a6e-300x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1749"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1749"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1749\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1750,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1749\/revisions\/1750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}