Hunter Baker: The unspoken burden on future generations

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, October 22nd. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

From the early 1970s to the end of the 20th century, a major political issue in the United States was the national debt. But this election cycle, neither presidential candidate is offering much of a plan to fix it. WORLD Opinions contributor Hunter Baker says that is a mistake.

HUNTER BAKER: After the national debt nearly doubled during the Jimmy Carter administration, Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan made the problem a top campaign issue…

REAGAN: Carter is acting as if he hadn't been in charge for the past three and a half years as if someone else ran up nearly two hundred billion dollars in federal red ink as if someone else was responsible for the largest deficit including off budget items in American history…

Reagan won the election, but the U.S. national debt continued to rise during his presidency. He was a natural fiscal conservative who was hamstrung by his determination to win the Cold War through defense spending. Not to mention a Congress hostile to his desire to cut domestic spending. Reagan’s tax cuts are often blamed for the continued yearly deficits, but the reality is revenues grew. The problem was spending.

The end of the Cold War offered a respite. The United States was able to reduce military spending and realize a sort of peace dividend. Thanks to a combination of President Bill Clinton’s fiscal policy and the restraint imposed by a Republican Congress beginning in 1994, the government did what seemed impossible. It produced a surplus rather than a deficit from 1998 to 2001. The United States, it appeared, would actually begin to pay down its national debt and achieve a level of fiscal discipline that would only cement its post–Cold War dominance.

What has happened since can only be characterized as a fiscal disaster. The shocks of 9/11, wars in the Middle East, the financial crisis of 2008, and the nation’s response to COVID-19 all radically changed the budget picture. Since that last surplus in 2001, the United States has become a nation with a spiraling yearly deficit. It has exceeded a trillion dollars in most years since 2008, when Barack Obama was elected president. Continuing through the Trump and Biden administrations.

Demographic trends work against us as we appear to have lost all budget discipline. Social Security and Medicare recipients have grown as a population while U.S. birth rates have declined. That means there are relatively few workers to support a very large body of beneficiaries.

Despite this growing crisis few seem to be talking about it…even as the debt has increased by $7 trillion during Joe Biden’s single term alone. We are now spending more on interest each year than on national defense. The only budget item we spend more on than our debt is Social Security and Medicare. All of us realize—or should realize—that interest on the debt will work against us the same way compound interest benefits the saver.

The Republican Party once campaigned on a platform of cutting government spending and paying down the national debt. To be fair, Democrats of a certain stripe attacked the problem from a different position, which was proposing to raise taxes to generate more budget dollars. Neither side has a plan today. Neither is talking to voters in a sober, pragmatic way about what must be done to put our fiscal house in order.

We live in an age in which there is a near-constant dialogue about justice. Criminal justice, social justice, environmental justice, immigration justice—just to name a few. One form of justice that has gone sadly neglected is generational justice. Through our irresponsible budget practices, printing of money, massive interest charges, and lost purchasing power we are leaving the generations who come after us in a greatly hampered position. They are like a couple who enters a restaurant at the end of the evening and are presented with the bill for all the parties that ate at the same table before them. It isn’t right.

One of the most fundamental tasks of any government is to maintain a solid fiscal foundation for future generations to build upon. It’s time for America’s political class to stop pretending budgetary limits don’t matter.

I’m Hunter Baker.

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