People still don’t understand debt

2019年10月29日星期二

People still don’t understand debt

October 29, 2019

A sheet of rare star notes stacked at the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing's facility in Fort Worth.Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By Paul Krugman

Opinion Columnist

Today's column is about our trillion dollar deficit, which nobody seems to care about. The thing is, this lack of concern is justified: There's no good reason to believe that the current budget deficit is doing significant harm.

What did do a lot of harm was the deficit hysteria that dominated establishment discourse the last time we had a deficit this big, which also happened to be a period during which the economy was deeply depressed, and the stimulus from deficit spending was actually a good thing. It should have been obvious that obsessing about deficits in 2012 was a huge mistake. What's relatively new — and something I couldn't get into at length in the column — is the realization that government debt isn't much of a problem even at full employment.

One reason people find this hard to understand is that they make an analogy between the nation as a whole and an individual family. This leads to sober-sounding warnings that budget deficits amount to stealing from our children, in the same way that spendthrift parents are squandering their heirs' inheritance.

This analogy, however, is all wrong. Debt is money we owe to ourselves — that is, for the most part it obliges one group of Americans, taxpayers, to make payments to another group of Americans, bondholders. It doesn't directly make the nation poorer, at all. (O.K., there's a small caveat: some debt is held by foreigners. But it's not quantitatively important.)

Now, there might be indirect ways in which debt makes us poorer. To pay interest, the government might have to spend less or collect more taxes than it would have otherwise. And this could hurt growth — for example, high taxes could reduce incentives to produce and invest.

What economists have come to realize, however, is that even these indirect costs of debt may be negligible.

Why, after all, must a government raise taxes to deal with a higher level of debt? The usual answer is that if it doesn't, the debt will snowball: the government will have to pay more in interest, which will cause the debt to rise further, leading to even more interest payments, and so on.

But nobody cares about the absolute value of debt; what matters is the ratio of debt to the tax base, which for the federal government is basically the whole economy, i.e., G.D.P. And a rise in the debt/G.D.P. ratio doesn't snowball — it melts! Why? Because the interest rate on federal debt is normally lower than the economy's growth rate.

Right now, in particular, U.S. 10-year bonds are paying less than 2 percent, while G.D.P. normally grows around 4 percent a year — half real, half rising prices. So even if the government only raised enough money to pay noninterest expenses, totally ignoring interest, debt would grow more slowly than the economy, and the ratio to G.D.P. would shrink over time. So the government does need, more or less, to pay for what it spends, but taking on more debt now won't make that task any harder in the future.

I don't want to say that debt never does any harm. And if you're going to run up debt, it should be for a good purpose, like rebuilding infrastructure, not to give rich people even more money to spend on luxuries. But debt isn't a huge evil, and bringing it down shouldn't be anyone's priority.

Quick Hits

The debt crisis in Europe motivated a lot of the hysteria here. But that crisis vanished for everyone but Greece when Mario Draghi, the outgoing president of the European Central Bank, said three words — "whatever it takes" — which markets saw as a pledge to provide cash if needed. And now even Greece has interest rates below 2 percent.

Olivier Blanchard, the immensely respected former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, on why debt isn't as scary as you think.

The very establishment Larry Summers and Jason Furman make a similar argument.

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