Sigh. Matt Yglesias draws my attention to this week’s cover of Time, a Trump-friendly warning that we’re all doomed thanks to the national debt. Matt takes apart this inane argument just fine, but I’ll do it more quickly: You will never have to pay down this debt. Nor will your children. Or your grandchildren. Just forget about it.
And if we ever do have to pay some of it down? We’ll get to pay it off over decades, just like any other debt. And the rich will pay a bigger share than you. But I guess “You might someday owe $145 per year” doesn’t make a very good magazine cover.
I know the doomsayers don’t care, but at the moment we’re paying about 2 percent of GDP to service the national debt. The chart below shows how that’s skyrocketed since—um, I mean, declined steadily since its height during the Reagan era. Pretty scary, isn’t it?
