September 08, 2017
Okay, they haven’t written anything about too many iPhones that I know of, but the paper continually displays its irrational fear of too much government borrowing. It did so yet again in a discussion of plans to temporarily raise the debt ceiling and possibly to get rid of it altogether. The piece presents the views of the Peter Peterson-funded Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget that the country faces a serious debt and deficit problem.
The evidence of a problem with debt and deficits would be high interest rates and/or inflation. In fact, interest rates remain extraordinarily low, as does the inflation rate, which has been persistently below the Federal Reserve Board’s target of a 2.0 percent average inflation rate. The debt is not even a serious measure of generational balance as it is often used. The austerity that has resulted from concerns over the debt has cost us tens of trillions of dollars of future output, making our children and grandchildren far poorer than if we had pursued sound macroeconomic policies in the years following the Great Recession.
It would be helpful if the Washington Post had economics-based discussions of debts and deficits rather than hyping the irrational fears promoted by a Wall Street billionaire.
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