Timothy R. Clark: Adding to our debt is like freeclimbing El Capitan

If you have done any of these things, I hope you don’t come away with the curious view that somehow you have special immunity from consequence, that inviolate principles were somehow suspended in your behalf. All of these things are knowable risks, and if you somehow avoided them, you and your poor judgment are the exception.

There are some choices that produce glacial consequences. As a result, we have time to convince ourselves that the consequences won’t come. In most of these cases, the consequences become the inheritance of the next generation. This is one of the ways that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children.

Let’s talk about our poor judgment. Consider the national debt. We have come to a place of profound denial and breathtaking irresponsibility. Astonishingly, the political will to change is still missing. It’s missing in our leaders and it’s missing in us. In the short space of 10 years, we have doubled the size of the federal government and nearly tripled our indebtedness. In 2002, the federal debt was $6.2 trillion. Today it’s $16 trillion.

In “The Sun Also Rises,” one of Earnest Hemingway’s characters is asked how he went bankrupt. He responds, “Gradually, then suddenly.”

Some people now warn us that austerity without growth will send the nation into a death spiral. May I ask what further spending without growth will do? And may I also ask what injections of artificial demand in the form of stimulus have done so far? We act like a business betting on the come that it can increase revenues while it refuses to consider the possibility that it should reduce its expenditures. We are a family that cannot afford its lifestyle.