Ballooning national debt is a national disgrace | Letter

1998. Sit with that for a second. That's the last time the people we send to Washington actually balanced a checkbook, and most of the country wasn't even paying a mortgage yet. Four straight years of surpluses under Clinton and a Republican Congress happened because both sides had to actually negotiate spending caps and live with them. Nobody was happy about it. That's usually the sign a deal is real.

What's changed since isn't a mystery. Two parties took turns finding new reasons the rules didn't apply to them this time. Wars got put on the credit card. Bailouts got put on the credit card. A pandemic, tax cuts nobody paid for, stimulus nobody paid for, it all went on the same card, and both parties signed for it. The debt didn't balloon because one villain showed up in 2001 and ruined everything. It ballooned because every Congress since decided the next Congress could deal with it.

The letter writer is right to be disgusted, and honestly the disgust should run deeper than a single letter to the editor. We're closing in on $34 trillion with interest payments now competing with the defense budget for space in the ledger. That's not an abstraction, it's money that isn't going to roads, or troops, or anything else, because it's going to service debt we ran up buying votes for thirty years.

The 1998 example matters because it proves this isn't some impossible math problem. It's a discipline problem, and discipline is the one thing Washington treats as optional. Until leaders in both parties are willing to say no to their own side's spending habit, not just the other guy's, we'll keep having this same conversation with a bigger number attached to it every time.