Since the incomparable William F. Buckley, Jr., has already
dealt with this subject in 1958, I defer to his inimitable style in
introducing the subject of today’s column:
Halfway through the second term of Franklin Roosevelt, the New
Deal braintrusters began to worry about mounting popular concern
over the national debt.… Indeed, Franklin Roosevelt had talked
himself into office, in 1932, in part by promising to hack away at
a debt which, even under the frugal Mr. Hoover, the people tended
to think of as grown to menacing size.… And then, suddenly, the
academic community came to the rescue. Economists across the length
and breadth of the land were electrified by a theory of debt
introduced in England by John Maynard Keynes. The politicians wrung
their hands in gratitude. Depicting the intoxicating political
consequences of Lord Keynes’s discovery, the wry cartoonist of the
Washington Times Herald drew a memorable picture. In the
center, sitting on a throne in front of a maypole, was a jubilant
FDR, cigarette tilted up almost vertically, a grin on his face that
stretched from ear to ear. Dancing about him in a circle, hands
clasped together, their faces glowing with ecstasy, the
braintrusters, vested in academic robes, sang the magical
incantation, the great discovery of Lord Keynes: “We owe
it to ourselves.”
With five talismanic words, the planners had disposed of the
problem of deficit spending…. Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect
and elect…
After being pinned to the wall in such eloquent fashion like a
rare butterfly, you would think the conceit that “We owe the
national debt to ourselves” would have been long retired to some
museum of rhetorical antiquities. But no, we find that even today
the doctrine is still vigorously alive, at least in the mind of
Paul Krugman, the lunatic columnist of the New York Times
who has just published another 300-page volume that can be digested
into three words: “Spend, spend, spend” — the government, that
is.
I admit I stopped reading Krugman a long time ago. You can only
listen to a one-track mind for so long before it loses any further
informational value. It all reminds me of the scene in Woody
Allen’s Take the Money and Run where Virgil Starkwell, the
inept career bank robber, drops a rock on the foot of a prison
guard and is “locked in solitary confinement for a week with an
insurance salesman” whom we last see disappearing into the hole
with Woody propounding, “Now you’re gonna need life. I think term
would be best. Then we’re going to want to cover you for
accidents.…” That’s what Paul Krugman sounds like.
Fortunately, the New York Post’s Kyle Smith has stuck
his head into the maelstrom and
reports in his Sunday column last week what Krugman is up to
these days. Wouldn’t you know, he finds the Nobel Laureate still
flogging that same 1930s horse:
“People think of debt’s role in the economy as if it were the
same as what debt means for an individual: There’s a lot of money
you have to pay to someone else. But that’s all wrong; the debt we
create is basically money we owe to ourselves, and the burden it
imposes does not involve a real transfer of resources.”
In actuality, “We owe it to ourselves” is one of those deceiving
little pieces of rhetoric whereby liberals put their arm around
your and pat you on the back while picking your pocket. Let’s try
an illustration. Imagine for a moment that you have taken out a
30-year mortgage on a house and owe the bank $300,000. Two years
into your payments you lose some of your income and start falling
behind. After three months the bank sends you a note saying that if
the situation isn’t straightened out within another three months,
they may have to foreclose.
Do you think it would be possible to go into the vice
president’s office, put your arm around his shoulder and say,
“Look, what’s the difference whether I pay you or not? I mean, we
owe it to ourselves, don’t we?”
We don’t owe the national debt to ourselves. Some of us owe it
to others. Those who owe are generally called “wage earners,”
“taxpayers,” or “U.S. citizens.” Those who are owed are called
“lenders” and “bondholders.” Now there may be some taxpayers who
are also bondholders and bondholders who are also U.S. citizens,
but the two groups are not identical. Reneging on any of the debt
will produce an unequal outcome — what Krugman would call a “real
transfer of resources.”
Look at it another way. A second class of stakeholders in this
game is government employees who have a claim on pension rights
that stretch far, far into the future. When the day comes — and it
may not be long — that governments find they are having difficulty
in meeting these obligations, will it be possible for them to brush
off pensioners by saying, “Look, you don’t really need a check
right now. I mean, we’d just be paying ourselves, right?”
The problem here is that modern governments are run by people
who can’t make these kinds of calculations. This is especially true
of the populists who congregate in the Democratic Party. Even the
brightest of them see government as an entity above ordinary
morality. In an article last week, for instance, USA Today
revealed that the true size of the national debt is not the
$16,000 per household that registers on the “Deficit Clock” but
$42,000 per household — very near the average household income of
$49,000. This is because, contrary to the rules that govern private
companies and state and local governments, Congress does not
require itself to include future health and retirement commitments
on its books. That’s enough to take $3.7 trillion off the annual
shortfall, chopping it from $5 trillion to $1.7 trillion.
What was really scary, however, was the comment of one Jim
Horney, a former Senate budget staff expert now at the liberal
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He told USA Today
that “retirement programs should not count as part of the deficit
because, unlike a business, Congress can change what it owes by
cutting benefits or lifting taxes.” Did you get that? We can ignore
future commitments to Medicare and Social Security because — what
the heck — we can always just cut benefits or raise tax rates to
something like 90 percent. All that will be required is the
“political will.” Even liberals who can add and subtract generally
don’t have the nerve to confront what they’re doing.
The national debt is not owed “to ourselves.” It is owed to
bondholders who have loaned money on the understanding that they
are going to be paid back. Even Democrats in the highest positions
often have trouble grasping this reality. During the early days of
the Clinton Administration, when the new President was being told
he couldn’t borrow heedlessly to stimulate the economy, James
Carville became famous for complaining, “I used to think that if
there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or
the pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come
back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.” Apparently
it never occurred to Carville that there are real people out there
buying those bonds.
The bond market is not an abstraction. It is a group
of people who have loaned money to the government. As
creditors, they are acutely aware of the unspoken words at the end
of “We owe it to ourselves,” which are, “We owe it to ourselves,
therefore we really don’t have to worry about paying it
back.”
Now of course we’re a long way away from not paying anything
back. As long as there is trouble in the world, as long as the
stock market remains remain uncertain, as long as real estate is
risky, as long as the full faith and credit of Tanzania or Portugal
is open to question, there will investors eager to snap up U.S.
Treasury Bonds. In fact with things falling apart among all those
Eurozone countries who only “owe it to themselves,” interest rates
on 30-year Treasuries are at their lowest rate in decades. But
let’s look 30 years out to a time when some of those commitments
will be coming due.
In 1938 or even 1978, it might still have been possible to argue
“We owe it to ourselves.” Most bond holders were U.S. citizens who
could always be stiff-armed because “their loss is our loss.” But
that is no longer true. About 30 percent of the $16 trillion U.S.
debt is now owned by foreigners. The Chinese government is the
third largest creditor, behind the Federal Reserve and the Social
Security Trust Fund, owning 8 percent of the total. The Chinese now
hold more than all U.S. households combined. Japan, the UK, Brazil,
Taiwan, and Hong Kong are also big lenders. Foreigners now own more
than half the debt not held by some division of the U.S.
government. If the debt continues to pile up at a rate of more than
$1 trillion a year, paying it off will involve a “real transfer of
resources.”
Yet as Greece is demonstrating now, the system won’t fall apart
because we can’t pay our debts. It will eventually fall apart but
because we won’t be able to go on borrowing to maintain
our standard of living. The crisis will come to a
head when investors decide to they don’t want to lend anymore. Then
it will be impossible to meet day-to-day expenses. If a left-wing
government takes control of Greece this month and renounces its
obligations, Greece with not have enough money way to pay the
hundreds of thousands of government employees and pensioners who
receive a check each month. That’s when
“We’re-all-in-this-together” finally bites back.
Now all this probably isn’t going to be enough to convince Paul
Krugman that government deficits have real consequences. But I’ll
tell you what. Next time you read one of his columns saying how
spending borrowed money is the only way to end a recession, drop
him a note saying the following:
Hey Paul, I’m having a little trouble paying the rent this
month. Do you think you could loan me a couple of thousand dollars?
It’ll carry me over and maybe in a while things will get better.
And as far as paying you back — well, look, we’re all in this
together, right? We’ll owe it to ourselves.
