There is a school of thought — serious, not fringe — that holds the national debt is a symptom, not the disease. The disease, in this view, is too much tax revenue, which enables both the spending and the borrowing. On this account, the entitlement state did not produce the debt; abundant revenue made the entitlement state possible in the first place. Curb the revenue and you curb the appetite. The debt follows. It is a provocative argument, and it has the virtue of pointing upstream of where most fiscal commentary stops. My argument today runs alongside it, not against it. Whatever the root cause, the arithmetic downstream is the same, and compound interest does not wait for the philosophical debate to be resolved.
Read Full Article »
