The Debt Crisis Is a Scam - WNYC

The Debt Crisis Is a Scam - WNYC

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Brace yourself: the phony debate about the government’s deficit and debt “crisis” will kick into overdrive this week as we hit the December 1 deadline for the federal deficit commission's final recommendations. We’re being told it’s time to tighten our belts because the government is spending too much money. But the debate is an illusion and false: there is no government deficit or debt “crisis.”

We have plenty of money, or access to money, and any money issues we have are all quite manageable. This is still the richest nation in the history of the planet. One day, the debt/deficit “crisis” will assume its ranks among fairy tales such as Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and trickle-down economics.

The question before us is simple: what are our priorities as a country, how should we spend our great wealth and who should pay to advance those priorities?

In my new book, It’s Not Raining, We're Getting Peed On: The Scam of the Deficit Crisis, I look at the foolish statements made about the phony “crisis." In 1946, for example, the country’s debt-to-gross domestic product ratio—meaning, how much we owed compared to how much we produced—was 108.6 percent. In other words, the adults living right after World War II were handed the greatest debt the country had ever had, but that generation experienced the greatest prosperity in the country’s history—and maybe even in the history of humans. Today, the debt-to-GDP ratio isn’t even close to that.