Debt Debate Looms on Capitol Hill

As Congress gears up for a heavyweight slugfest on the budget, Republicans are setting the table for the debate with a very slick, ominous web ad about the crushing debt Democrats have racked up with excessive spending:

As we've discussed at length, the president's new budget proposal adds $7.2 Trillion to the national debt over the next ten years and does nothing to rein in unsustainable entitlement spending. This isn't knee-jerk, Right-wing alarmism: Over the weekend, the Washington Post reported some additional horrid numbers:

The daunting tower of national, state and local debt in the United States will reach a level this year unmatched just after World War II and already exceeds the size of the entire economy, according to government estimates.

But any similarity between 1946 and now ends there. The U.S. debt levels tumbled in the years after World War II, but today they are still climbing and even deep cuts in spending won't completely change that for several years.

As President Obama and Republicans squabble over whose programs to cut and which taxes to raise, slow growth and a rising tide of interest payments - largely beyond their control - are making the job of fixing the budget much harder than in the past. Statehouses and governors face similar challenges.

After World War II, the federal debt - including debt purchased by the Social Security Trust Fund - hit nearly 122 percent of gross domestic product. State and municipal debt back then was minimal. By the time Dwight Eisenhower was elected president six years later, the federal government's debt had dipped to about three-fourths of GDP.

The key factor in the rapid drop in government debt, said Harvard University economist Kenneth Rogoff, was fast economic growth. Spurred by a young labor force, world-leading manufacturers, high personal savings rates, a pent-up demand for consumer goods after years of war and the Depression, and a bout of inflation, the economy grew 57 percent in six years. Thanks to sharp postwar cuts in defense outlays, federal government spending also tumbled for a couple of years.

But today the U.S. economy is in a polar opposite condition. The labor force is aging, U.S. manufacturing often lags behind Asian and European rivals, households are in hock up to their eyeballs, and consumer appetite for goods is tepid. In addition, inflation is tame and government spending locked into entitlement programs and debt service that will be hard or impossible to alter.

Keep these statistics on hand for when Democrats inevitably begin to ratchet up their demagoguery machine over the budget. If they couldn't stomach Republicans' paltry $61 Billion in cuts in the face of a $1.6 Trillion 2011 deficit, one doubts they'll demonstrate the capacity to address long-term entitlements in a responsible manner.