How Did We Reach a $38 Trillion Debt During a ‘Shutdown’? | The American Spectator

Only in America can the government reach a $38 trillion debt during a shutdown.

The debt sprinted from $37 trillion to $38 trillion in a month and nine days — record time for a trillion-dollar leap outside of the coronavirus pandemic. That more than half of this period overlapped with the closure of the federal government exposes both the lie of “shutdowns” and the precariousness of the predicament in which Americans find themselves.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Budget and Economic Outlook report to begin the decade did not even forecast a $37 trillion debt until the 2030s. Barely halfway through the 2020s, we have sped past that stop sign.

“The federal government is still shut down,” began an NPR.com headline on Thursday, hours after the Associated Press reported on the $38 trillion debt reached, quietly, on Tuesday. Of course, the federal government never really shut down.

The Post Office still delivers credit card applications that promise 50,000 frequent flyer miles in exchange for a 22 percent annual rate, Pell Grants continue to enable universities to raise tuition past the affordability of normal Americans (which necessitates more Pell Grants), the USS Gerald R. Ford sits off Croatia and not in a scrapyard, Yellowstone opened today as it does every day, and 74 million Americans received Social Security checks this month.

Some government employees went on furlough. All citizen tax dollars remain hard at work. Very little of our government shut down.

Much of it must.

Maya MacGuineas of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget points out that “we’re on course to spend $1 trillion just on interest payments on the national debt this year, exceeding our spending on our national defense. Something has to give — and eventually it will, whether we are prepared for it or not.”

The Pete Peterson Foundation notes that “net interest payments … over the next decade, are projected to average $1.4 trillion per year.”

Think about that. The federal government paid $1.2 trillion to service the debt during the fiscal year that just ended (net interest payments totaled about $900 billion). The U.S. government pays more in interest on its debt than all but about a dozen other nations in the world pay for their entire budgets. The larger our annual deficits grow, the more the interest payments become a budgetary death spiral.

The solution is at once simple to envision and difficult to implement.

To cut that annual $1.2 trillion interest payment — about one of every six dollars that the federal government allocates — legislators must not merely spend less but spend less than they receive.

To spend less than they receive, legislators must cut all of those programs that did not shut down when the liar class (politicians and journalists) insisted that the federal government had shut down. This includes Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, ObamaCare, and defense. Clearly, Department of Government Efficiency cuts to the Department of Education, and the Trump administration’s subsequent shuttering of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, did not offset outlay increases elsewhere. Filing at the margins, rather than cleaving the meat of the matter, does not cut it.

To visualize our debt, imagine dollar bills placed end to end from the Earth to the Sun and back 20 times (and indulge me in imagining the dollar bills not burning when in proximity to the Sun). Even if every American became a slave for the next year to our debtmasters and turned over the entire gross domestic product to them, we would still owe about $8 trillion.

Republicans and Democrats argue that debt limits and government shutdowns, i.e., a period in which the feds cannot borrow additional funds, are the problem. Their solution to this problem — the ability to borrow more — is the big problem.

Let the real government shutdown begin.

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