The Debt Myth: “We Owe It to Ourselves”

The Treasury Department released its August statement of receipts and outlays with all the ceremony the occasion deserved: none. No press conference, no address, just a PDF on a government website, the way a man slips a foreclosure notice under the door. Buried in Table 3 sits a number that would have been a scandal in any saner era: of every dollar Washington expects to collect in income taxes this year, forty-three cents will go to interest on the national debt. Not to pay it down. Just to carry it. Run the arithmetic; Treasury prints it in plain sight. The...