Janet Yellen Wasn’t Worried About $50 trillion in Debt Rising to $63 trillion in 10 Years. She was happy to leave it to the next administration to solve. She said the inflation was temporary.
We are over $40 trillion in debt and are still spending $2 trillion more a year than we take in. Congress seems incapable of cutting, despite most of the wildest increases coming from pandemic spending and waste under Democrats.
Let’s not forget how we got here. The $50 trillion debt was foretold by Janet Yellen, Biden’s Keynesian Treasury Secretary, who at the same time encouraged spending and borrowing. She never worried about the debt, just GDP.
PRICES WERE UP MORE THAN 20% UNDER JOE
This Biden administration was pushing a $7.2 trillion budget and running a $3 trillion deficit. In less than ten years, we will have a $50 trillion debt, rising to $63 trillion in ten years.
Not only were they spending wildly, but they were regulating and taxing the people into poverty, destroying small businesses with a new set of 5300 regulations targeting small businesses.
The consumer price index, a broad measure of the price of everyday goods, including gasoline, groceries, and rent, rose 3.4% in April, down slightly from March. However, the report also showed that prices have increased more than 19.4% since Biden took office in 2021.
Yellen wasn’t concerned about the $50 trillion in debt over the next ten years.
Our only solution now seems to be to grow our way out of it, which is why Trump is investing in tariffs, decreasing taxes and regulations, DOGE, cutting wasteful agencies and bloated government, deporting illegal migrants, and growth in energy, manufacturing, and AI, et al. It is all aimed at growing the economy.
Senator Ron Johnson: You’re gonna drive the debt from $32 trillion to $50 trillion… correct? < br> < br> Janet Yellen: Yes… but the metric that matters the most is relative debt to GDP ratio
Who’s gonna buy your debt?pic.twitter.com/cwU8zlXrcc
— 🌋🌋 Deep₿lueCrypto 🌋🌋 (@DeepBlueCrypto) April 6, 2023
Democrats Let Paul Krugman Guide Them for Decades
Paul Krugman wanted the debt left to the children, supposing that children will be better off after inheriting their parents’ bankruptcy.
AIER Report (2019)
Paul Krugman coined the term “zombie ideas” to describe “policy ideas that keep getting killed by evidence, but nonetheless shamble relentlessly forward, essentially because they suit a political agenda.”
Krugman has revived one of his favorite zombies: the notion that high government deficits aren’t dangerous in the way that an individual incurring heavy debt is because the national debt is “money we owe to ourselves.” He doubled down on his claims in response to an article comparing the dangers the debt poses to future generations to climate change.
Krugman has repeatedly written on this topic on his blog (see here and here). It was a common refrain of his during the Eurozone crisis and in the aftermath of the Great Recession when there was a bipartisan push to cut future deficits to prevent future Greek-style debt crises.
As with most myths, there is a grain of truth to the claim. National debt does differ from the debt individuals and households incur in a few notable ways. Individuals have a finite lifetime to incur and repay their debts. Governments don’t; they can pass debt onto future generations. So long as people are willing to lend it money and the government can service debt as it comes due, government debt can persist in perpetuity. And to the extent that the debt is owned by domestic citizens, the money that is used to repay the debt needn’t leave the economy.