Numb to the Numbers
There’s a weird little bus stop at the corner of 18th and K streets in Washington, D.C. On the inside, a ticker tallies the national debt in real time, the glowing numbers whizzing by too quickly for the naked eye. On the outside, there’s a printed poster with a round number for the total debt: $34 trillion at press time.
I’ve lived in D.C. long enough to remember when changing that poster was a special occasion. But lately I’ve been checking regularly on my commute, since the trillions are racking up more quickly than they used to. The ink is barely dry on the current poster, yet the folks at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the fiscal responsibility nonprofit that maintains the display at the bus stop, will be due to roll out $35 trillion quite soon.
The bus stop is a semidesperate attempt to convince Washingtonians to care about—or at least give a passing thought to—the national debt as we go about our business. The debt has become an alarm bell ringing in the distance that people are pretending not to hear, especially in the city that caused the problem.
As Brian Riedl explains in this month’s cover story, the only way out will be if politicians—and voters—stop lying to themselves about the possibility of a quick fix. We can no longer “tweak our way out of this,” he writes, as we might have in the 1980s or ’90s. No one party’s pet proposals can solve the crisis. Yet the bipartisan trend is headed in exactly the wrong direction. Politicians of both parties have tacitly agreed to rule out all of the viable solutions.
Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, commented on a recent Congressional Budget Office report: “There
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