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spending created 56 new billionaires; the 659 billionaires received at least $960 billion in 2020 (which is enough to have provided $15,000 to each of the struggling 64 million American families); they have about $4 trillion of wealth, which is about double that of the bottom half of all Americans. I suggest that this current and growing concentration of income and wealth, more than the national debt issue, poses a far larger problem for us. Darling seems to attribute the problem of a large national debt to “socialism” but not to capitalism. But the USA has had, for about two centuries, socialism, or at least some elements of it, in the USA. Given the huge amount of governmental regulation, we certainly are not a capitalist country. Much of It has been socialism for the rich for which we “small folks” get stuck paying. Think of the farm subsidies which largely benefit huge corporate agri-businesses and not much to your local farmer, tax breaks for the builders of football or other athletic arenas and to other developers where eminent domain is used to take property from the “little” people, depletion “allowances” to big businesses which mine our not-infinite resources, leasing public lands for a pittance, governmental owed or supported utilities and universities, tax-exempt businesses run by churches, universities, other similarly tax exempt organizations, governmental subsidized student loans, governmental subsidized insurance and encouragement for the idiots building in flood plains and coastal areas, the Wall Street bailout in 2008, the billions
of dollars of unsupervised giveaways to huge businesses in the pandemic laws, etc. How much of our annual addition to the national debt is related to these items? – David S. Brian Darling response: David, good questions and you raise some valid issues. The economy has not collapsed as a result of $28 trillion in accumulated debt and a record amount of spending last year, yet there are actual signs of danger today. The Congressional Budget Office has a good explanation that it put together in 2014 on the consequences of growing debt. It points to “lower national savings and income, higher interest payments, leading to tax hikes and spending cuts, decreased ability to respond to problems, and a greater risk of fiscal crisis.” It is likely that private borrowing will be pushed aside by government borrowing. We are already experiencing a weakening dollar versus other currencies. The weakening dollar is a real- world example of a consequence that we are seeing today. We have witnessed excessive national debt cause government chaos and domestic turmoil. The 2007-to-2008 Greek government debt crisis lead to a long Greek recession, national riots, and massive changes to tax and spending policy. Greece was lucky that it had a small enough economy to get bailed out, yet nobody is going to bail out the United States if we have a similar crisis. I disagree, though, when you point to the
American Consequences
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