In my mid-twenties, my one-bedroom in Astoria, Queens, developed a roach problem. I don’t mean the odd single scurry disappearing irretrievably beneath the fridge, either. Oh, it started that way. But I didn’t take measures when the situation was manageable because roaches gave me the creeps, and so many activities beckoned that were much more fun.
Between a small shelf and the kitchen wall I stored spare brown paper bags – from which I began to detect a rustling. At some point, the bags began to move. Beside them, the wall gathered an undulating shadow that I trained myself never to look at directly; like Faye Dunaway in Little Big Man, I would ‘avert my eyes at the necessary moment’. One night a friend came to dinner and stared at that wall in frank revulsion. Why didn’t I do something? I looked at him blankly. About what? He was desperate to leave.
Finally, having turned my flat into a low-budget horror film, I faced the music. I was single, and no man would save me. Though it was summer, I donned jeans, long sleeves, gloves and boots. I tied a bandana over my mouth and nose like a bank robber in Gunsmoke. I clutched my six-shooters: an economy–size spray can of insecticide in each hand. At last, I focused on the hundreds if not thousands of insects climbing atop each other and breeding more. I hit the mass with both barrels. They exploded everywhere. I probably stomped more of the bastards than I poisoned. I’ve seldom felt so proud of myself.
Yet I’ve also seldom felt so disgusted with myself – for ignoring a pressing problem and allowing it to get out of hand. Which, in however roundabout a fashion, brings us to the biggest immediate threat to the stability of the United States, of the UK and other western powers and of the whole world as we currently understand it. That’s not a modestly rising average global temperature or even nuclear war. It’s debt.
America’s national debt just crossed the signal threshold of $40 trillion. In 2000, the US owed $5.7 trillion – a sum that in 25 years multiplied by seven times. Like that unconfronted roach infestation, the debt gets only worse. On the current trajectory, we’ll hit $50 trillion in six years or less. It was ‘only’ $20 trillion ten years ago.
Why, then, is the nation’s whopping IOU not an electoral issue? Why is it playing no noticeable part in either party’s campaigns for the midterms? Why did it play no real part in America’s 2024 presidential election? Lest foreign gawkers relish their schadenfreude, why didn’t reducing a UK debt nearing 100 per cent of GDP feature in 2024’s poll? Before next year’s elections in France, why is every party already competing over who promises to spend more borrowed money?
Theories? Sovereign debt is a drag. Address of this matter makes no sector of the electorate happy. Higher taxes, fewer benefits – what’s to like? Politicians foolish enough to campaign even on merely reducing the deficit, thus keeping the roach nest roughly the same seething size, will lose. STOMP THE ROACH NEST isn’t a beguiling bumper sticker.
Next, abstraction. This is about numbers, and much of the average electorate is borderline innumerate. A million is a lot, a billion is a whole lot, a trillion is literally inconceivable – which is why, rhetorically, punters and commentators alike often get the M-words, B-words and T-words mixed up. Numerical issues seem dry and intangible. That 40 trillion milestone made me feel a little sick, but for most people mere digits don’t pack an emotional punch.
Then there’s the ownership problem. Electorates don’t recognise all this money owed as their debt. For lower earners, progressive taxation encourages the ‘nothin’ to do with me, guv’ disclaimer. Forty per cent of American households pay no federal income tax, and 50 per cent of adults pay only 3 per cent of the tax’s total take. More than a third of British adults (down from 43 per cent, due to bracket creep) also pay no income tax. When government isn’t taking your money, it also doesn’t seem to be borrowing on your personal behalf. Given the other half of the country already pays for pretty much everything, surely the same half of the country will contend with the debt – assuming the less well-off think about the debt at all, and they probably don’t, because practically no one does.
Updated multiple times per second, the dizzying national debt clock in midtown Manhattan was manually modified in 2008 to accommodate the tens of trillions by which its creator never imagined the feds would ever overspend. Attempting to counter taxpayer alienation from reality, the LED readout displays how much each American household owes (currently $295,500, or £216,500). Yet few tourists take the horrifying statistic to heart.
That 40 trillion milestone made me feel a little sick, but for most people digits don’t pack an emotional punch
Lastly, perching on the edge of your chair for too long gives you a ridge in the bum. National debts keep going up and up, they seem more and more perilous, and then: nothing happens. Supposedly this reckless borrowing is unsustainable, but anything truly unsustainable is not sustained, and we’re sustaining our hearts out. Er, until recently – look at Japan!
You can sometimes do something stupid for yonks, and then suddenly you can’t. Most economists concur that rampant sovereign borrowing ends in 1) bankruptcy, when investors refuse to lend to governments or demand such high yields that national budgets are overwhelmed by payments on the debt; 2) runaway inflation, reducing debt to chump change but devastating pensions, portfolios and ordinary people; 3) a dramatic, perhaps global, default that zeroes debt but also destroys wealth on such a scale that it likely kicks off what we politely term ‘civil unrest’. But nobody knows when the buck stops.
A memorable 1979 Smithsonian exhibit glued 130,000 freeze-dried roaches all over a model kitchen – the result of one pair of insects in ideal conditions over three breeding cycles, or about 18 months. It was grotesque. That could have been my Astoria kitchen. It could also have been an exhibit about interest payments.
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