The Culture Wars as Distraction

You know what you get for spending trillions of dollars you don’t have? More fights over Dr. Seuss, cancel culture, and identity politics. 

By any measure, the federal government has been on a spending spree for decades. Without getting bogged down in the green eyeshade stuff, suffice it to say Uncle Sam has been spending more than he takes in from tax revenues since the 1990s. We’ve made up those shortfalls by borrowing money. The national debt ($28 trillion) is now considerably larger than the GDP (about $21 trillion). 

Reasonable people can differ on how much value we got for all that credit card debt. But that’s not relevant here. 

What’s relevant is that when both parties reach a de facto bipartisan consensus that deficit spending is fine—at least when their party is doing the spending—it makes it difficult to argue about overspending or overborrowing in a credible way.