Morning Glory: Worried about the national debt?

If Congress won’t slash the spending that constitutes low-hanging fruit – subsidies for National Public Radio, for example, or mandatory reductions-in-force across the vast federal government – there is no point in attempting to warn voters about the national debt. If Congress and the president don’t care about small stuff when it comes to controlling the national debt, why should voters believe the debt is a problem that warrants entitlement reform? If you won’t lose five pounds, should anyone believe you are going to shed 100?

Young people worry about the impacts of climate change – a lot. Of course they do. How could they not, given media and elementary and secondary school curricula? Some research suggests 60% or more of high school students will tell surveyors that they view climate change as "an existential threat." Given how much time and attention is spent on cataclysmic rhetoric about climate change, it is surprising the number isn’t 95%

How about the national debt? Five years ago, Brooking Institute scholar Stuart Butler worried that very few Millennials cared about the national debt despite the projection that the national debt "is rising rapidly and will be close to 150% of GDP by 2050," and that the total "would easily surpass the previous record during World War II." 

STOP THE INSANITY. OUR NATIONAL DEBT NOW TOPS $35 TRILLION…

Butler – respected across the political spectrum – noted a "lot of frustration among economists and policymakers about the seeming unwillingness of young Americans to appreciate the enormous threat posed by deficits and debt."

"Prophesying fiscal disaster and urging action is a challenging line of work these days," he concluded.

NEW YORK, UNITED STATES - JANUARY 19: A screen shows the national debt clock after the US hit its debt limit and the Treasury started using extraordinary measures to avoid default on January 19, 2023. (Photo by Fatih Aktas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

It’s not going to get easier because the electorate does not care about the national debt. Not even young voters care, even though they are going to get stuck with the tab as the last tranche of Boomers bolt the workforce for retirement or eternity.

Voters under the age of 30 favored Vice President Harris by a few points in this month’s election, but in crucial states like Michigan it was a statistical tie. The gender gap that played out in 2024 was also present among young voters. The issues that mattered were very different among the young voters choosing Harris over Trump, but neither camp was concerned with the national debt. 

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The national debt of the United States is approximately $36 trillion dollars. The Peter G. Peterson Foundation keeps a steady eye on the total debt and on the interest cost of that debt, which is presently almost $2 billion a day, an interest-only slice of the federal budget which is expected to double over the next decade.

All of the presidents and all of the members of the House and the Senate of the past 75 years are responsible for spending the $36 trillion which we have collectively borrowed. But neither President-elect Trump nor his successor or their successor will be able to do much about the debt, even as it eats into the future prosperity of every American. Because the electorate simply shrugs off these numbers.

Because voters do not care about the debt, the debt won’t be addressed in the first or second budgets of the second Trump term or the laws that pass pursuant to the reconciliation process those budgets unlock. The debt will in all likelihood grow to more than 40 trillion before the 2026 elections have changed Congress again. That’s because President-elect Trump and the Senate and House will agree to extend and revise (and hopefully make permanent) the Trump tax cuts from 2018 and the productivity jolt that certainty about tax rates brings will take some years to show up in total tax receipts.

Debt doomsayers are everywhere and everywhere ignored. Reporters in the New York Times warned this week that "[b]udget experts have warned that his plans could add as much as $15 trillion to the national debt while increasing inflation and slowing growth." Hard to know on what such predictions are based given that we don’t have any idea what the first budget will look like much less the second. But this story was a flare to the rest of legacy media that the left has decided that annual federal budget deficits and the total national debt matter again after President Biden’s four-year spending spree. There will be more coverage of the debt because with the GOP in control, legacy media will want to blame Trump and his allies on Capitol Hill. But will all the hand-wringing ahead result in the national debt registering as an issue among voters?

Nah. Not a chance.

03 October 2024, USA, Washington: View of the White House. Photo: Valerie Plesch/dpa (Photo by Valerie Plesch/picture alliance via Getty Images)  (Valerie Plesch)

Inflation mattered in the election – a lot. So did the "wrong direction" number as super-majorities of Americans concluded Bidenomics was a disaster. Stagflation was the undoing of President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election and it was the undoing of Vice President Harris on November 5. Americans want the economy to boom, not contract or slink along. Trump’s tax cuts being made permanent could unleash productivity again.

But don’t expect spending cuts that matter or new revenue streams from any source unless and until there are at least gestures made by the Congress about cutting the cost of the federal government. Don’t blame the public for its indifference to alarms over the debt when Congress is still pulsing grants through the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. If the Congress cannot be serious about obvious cuts of agencies and subsidies that ought never to have been begun, don’t expect it to bring an axe to entitlements or to trot out new tax proposals.

If the debt alarms you, figure out a way to express the risk it poses to future generations the way that climate alarmists have persuaded Millennials, Generation Z and Generation Aloha that the future is dark because the planet is going to cook. Young voters worry about getting jobs and buying first houses or about the climate and abortion rights. Don’t expect them, much less the beneficiaries of entitlements, to demand fiscal responsibility unless and until Congress at least makes a show of shaving off the obvious fat.

Hugh Hewitt is host of "The Hugh Hewitt Show," heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990.  Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.

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