Persimmon Alley Press
Persimmon Alley Press
  • About Persimmon Alley Press
  • Books
    • Close Encounters with the Cold War
    • Mother's Century: A Survivor, Her People and Her Times
    • Encounters: Ten Appointments with History
    • Killer Protocols
    • Clean Coal Killers
    • The Killer Trees
    • A Feast of Famine
    • Molly Malice in Alterland
    • Alligator In My Basement
    • Sudden Addiction
    • The Flesh of the Cedarwood
  • Smoke the Dottle
  • Richard's Rants
  • Contact

Rant 583: Worried About the Debt? Really?

5/22/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
​Guess what! Suddenly, congressional Republicans are concerned about deficits and debt. This was one of the bedrock principles of what used to be the Republican Party before it mutated into the Trump Cult. Naively, I thought that after appropriating $3 trillion for Covid-19 relief, even the old codgers who cling to power under the guise of the GOP had finally, after 100 years, seen the Keynesian light, i.e., that the way to combat an economic downturn is to increase government spending.
 
But no, it is not to be. Mitch McConnell and even Donald Trump, whose ignorance of basic economics is exceeded only by his staggering historical illiteracy, are, voilà, suddenly worried about running up the national debt. This is, of course, after these characters pushed through a $2 trillion tax cut for the wealthy and big corporations in the days when coronavirus was still percolating only in bats. And that was on top of an equally large tax cut that Bush 43 gift-wrapped for the usual Republican suspects back in the aughts.
 
It’s instructive to look at what World War II cost America and compare it to today: The war cost $4.1 trillion in 2020 dollars. If you subtract the sale of war bonds, which covered 63 percent of the cost, you are left with $1.517 trillion in war debt (in 2020 dollars) at the end of the conflict, which amounted to 329 percent of GDP (without even considering the federal government’s non-war debt). Compare that to today, when even adding in $3 trillion (so far) of Covid-19 expenditures, total public debt adds up to 128 percent of GDP. We have a very long way to go before we arrive at World War II debt-to-GDP ratios.
 
What Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Congress understood back then was that a nation facing an existential crisis must spend whatever it takes to survive. Trump and McConnell and their clueless colleagues clearly do not understand that and we are the ones who will suffer the consequences.
 
By saving the country, the West and democracy back then, the money invested in the war was money well spent. Moreover, after the war, the wise growth policies pursued by the Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations brought that ratio down to pre-war levels by 1962. The 30 years of robust economic growth that followed the war give the lie to Trump’s spurious claims of creating “the greatest economy in history.”
 
We need to spend whatever it takes to assure our physical and economic survival. Anything less is a dereliction of duty and risks a societal devastation from which we might never recover.
 
Dick Hermann
May 22, 2020

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Picture

    Author

    Richard Hermann is the author of thirteen books, including Encounters: Ten Appointments with History and, most recently, Mother's Century: A Survivor, Her People and Her Times. Soon to be released is his upcoming Close Encounters with the Cold War, a personal reflection on growing up in the nuclear age. He is a former law professor and entrepreneur, and the founder and president of Federal Reports, Inc., a legal information and consulting firm that was sold in 2007. He has degrees from Yale University, the New School University, Cornell Law School and the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s School. He lives with his wife, Anne, and extraordinary dog, Barkley, in Arlington, Virginia and Canandaigua, New York.

    Archives

    June 2025
    May 2025
    April 2025
    March 2025
    February 2025
    January 2025
    December 2024
    November 2024
    October 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    July 2024
    June 2024
    May 2024
    April 2024
    March 2024
    February 2024
    January 2024
    December 2023
    November 2023
    October 2023
    September 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    June 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed