The debt clock is less than half a mile from where I live in New York City. My now nine-and-a-half-year-old son loves numbers, so the clock has long been a destination of choice when we are out and about. More recently, however, he's come to understand what the numbers mean.
In recent months, we've noticed that the debt on the clock is increasing by roughly $10,000 each second. That comes to "only" about $300 billion per year, well under one-quarter the deficit for the most recently completed fiscal year. That's probably because the biggest pieces of the deficit were added when enacted, rather than amortized over the course of the year. Still, I doubt the deficit for the current fiscal year is going to be closer to $300 billion than to $1 trillion.
Because my son is bright enough to be curious, but not yet bright enough to fully appreciate how little his father knows, he asked me how our country was going to pay back all the money it had borrowed. I didn't have the heart to tell him my answer. It's bad enough that I tell him how the Chicago Cubs and Bears have done; there's a limit to how much misery a child should have to sustain.
But here is what I would have told him. The only way out from under our debt is hyperinflation. No President of Fed Chief wants to be the one to pull that trigger, and the inevitable will be all the worse for the resulting delay. I don't mean late 1970's inflation. More like Germany between the wars, or, more recently, Argentina. And, to put it mildly, that sort of thing rarely ushers in a progressive era.
It's bad enough that my son will never know the joy of unlocked doors or unescorted trick-or-treating, that we have to read food labels with a magnifying glass to avoid GMOs and carcinogens masquerading as ingredients and that the planet may cease to be hospitable to human life. Should he really have to worry that, even if he dodges those bullets, he'll be on the losing end of a global economic shift, likely ruled by fascists?
I suppose there are some kids his age who don't think about those things, who are delighted with 500 channels and video games. I don't have one of them.