I don’t understand. For all my life I’ve heard about how bad the national debt is and that we’re saddling our children with an obligation they can never repay. Interest payments alone will dominate our future economy. Entire campaigns and political parties have been built on the premise that we should stop running federal deficits and should pay down the national debt. We were all horrified when our debt topped a trillion dollars during the Reagan years. Now we’re adding a trillion dollars every few months.
But suddenly, with coronavirus, and drastically reduced government revenue, we’re creating multiple trillion-dollar relief packages to get ourselves out of the crisis. Of course, we have to do something to save the economy, but if we can take on apparently unlimited debt now, for a just cause, was national debt ever a bad idea? Could we have incurred more debt to bolster education, fund infrastructure projects, improve transportation, create a more equitable society; all with no harm? Could we now?