The Bill Coming Due

The national debt is out of control because for thirty years Congress could not make a hard decision, and borrowed instead. We are now paying compound interest on three decades of avoidance.

Here are two numbers, because this part is not a matter of opinion.

Interest is now larger than everything else in the deficit combined. The deficit this year runs about 5.8 percent of the economy. Take out interest on the debt and what's left — every soldier, road, research grant, and benefit check, the entire operating cost of the United States government — is 2.6 percent, and projected to stay there for a decade.

We are not mainly overspending on programs. Each deferral was individually rational — it is always easier to borrow than to tell someone no. The outrage is cumulative.

Social Security's retirement fund runs short in 2032. Not eventually — there is a year printed on it, by the program's own trustees. At that point the money coming in covers seventy-eight percent of what was promised.

Make that concrete. The average retired worker gets a little under two thousand dollars a month. Seventy-eight percent of that is about fifteen hundred and sixty. So current law delivers a cut of roughly four hundred and forty dollars a month — five thousand a year — to someone living on twenty-four thousand.

Six years from now. To your mother, or to you. And nothing in current law addresses it, because both parties have correctly calculated that whoever proposes a specific fix first gets attacked for it.