Wednesday, September 18, 2013

We have entered the realm of the vicious circle: Debt and deficits will slow down economic growth, and slower economic growth will make our debt and deficits worse.

The Price of Politics: Debt and deficits impoverish us in ways we can only begin to measure. - Kevin D. Williamson/National Review Online

...As the CBO sees it, the economic weight of the deficits we’re expected to add just in the next 25 years is enough to bring the national debt from 100 percent of GDP to 200 or 250 percent of GDP, i.e., from paralyzing to catastrophic. The deficits we’ve run for the last 25 years have imposed costs of their own. That the costs mainly manifest themselves negatively — in the form of businesses that don’t exist, profits that aren’t collected, and help that is not wanted — does not make them any less real, or less tragic. In the long run, the deficit is as much about whether you have a decent job or die from diabetes complications as it is about figures in CBO estimates. The price may not always be obvious, but you pay it every day.