(U-WIRE) DURHAM, N.C. – I must admit that I’m quite thrilled at the prospect of an oncoming economic recession.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not any more shielded from the effects of a downturn than anyone else, and I have no interest in seeing the job market collapse the closer I get to graduation.
But it has to be said that looking down the barrel of economic uncertainty can make Duke students do what nothing else can: think about the state of our nation’s economy.
The life of the average student today has been mostly one of strong growth, with short downturns in the early ’90s and 2000s. When things go bad, we tend to simply point a finger at whoever’s in charge at the moment and demand that the government step in, stimulate here, spend a little there, maybe cut a few taxes or mail a few checks and then wait for the Dow to go back up.
And that’s worked fine in a short-term, year-to-year sort of way. But while we’ve all got money on our minds I think it’s important to take a look at the bigger national economic picture, because the truth is it’s a lot worse than most people realize.
The U.S. national debt, as of this writing, is $9,206,911,415,048.29. Now personally I don’t know that the numerical form gets the point across — that’s nine trillion, two hundred six billion, nine hundred eleven million, four hundred fifteen thousand, forty-eight dollars. And twenty-nine cents.
I specify “as of this writing” because columns are due two days before they run, so when you read this that number will probably be almost three billion dollars higher.
And if you’re interested, the per-citizen share of that is $30,265.22, according to the National Debt Clock. And by per-citizen share, I mean your share. Have I scared you yet? Good. Because this problem isn’t going away — it’s getting worse.
Now I can already hear what some of you will say: “It’s George W. Bush and the war in Iraq.” And while it’s true that the half-trillion venture hasn’t helped our nation’s solvency, it only makes up about 5.5 percent of the debt. Furthermore, the Iraq war will end one way or the other. Maybe next year, maybe in five years, maybe in 10. The truth is that it doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter because our government has already committed many times whatever the final cost of the war is to the big three federal entitlement programs: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. These three are, quite frankly, the biggest long-term problems we face as Americans.
Now, most people aren’t used to hearing that Medicare and Medicaid are inherently harmful to us. After all, they were meant to help us, and indeed many Americans are dependent on the services they provide.
President Bush, in a surprising bout of fiscal conservatism, tried to convince us of the Social Security problem, but that didn’t work out too well for him.
I could make an argument here about whether government safety nets are a good or a bad thing but that would be a distraction from the immediate issue, which is that we can’t pay for what we’ve promised.
And so what happens? We print money and devalue the dollar. We borrow money and find ourselves indebted to nations like China, which undermines our position to negotiate trade. And if you want to know what happens to countries that can’t pay their bills, I invite you to look up the respective bankruptcy crises of the Ottoman Empire and Egypt, or more recently, the Soviet Union.
Now, it’s usually at this point in my columns that I lay out “what we do now” or “how we solve the problem.” But this time, I don’t have the answer. If the solution were easy enough for me to figure out, somebody else would have implemented it by now.
The sad truth, however, is that very few people are even looking for the solution. Most don’t know there’s even a problem. Many don’t care when they find out. But we won’t have that luxury for too much longer. And as we watch the federal entitlement budget swell to 15 and 20 percent or more of GDP, we’ll wish we’d have paid attention earlier.
Unless, of course, we do start paying attention now, and start demanding that those who can do something about it start paying attention, too. Because if you and I don’t get the ball rolling, it’s hard to see who ever will.