National debt exceeds $33 trillion, but no one seems to care. With a government shutdown possibly happening sometime over the next two weeks if there's no spending deal in Congress, the U.S. national debt has quietly slipped past the $33 trillion mark for the first time. It is on track to exceed $50 trillion by the decade's end. "The increase in debt over the last 20 years was overwhelmingly driven by the trillions spent on Republican tax cuts skewed to the wealthy and big corporations," a White House spokesperson told The New York Times.
But this wholly ignores Democrats' massive spending, which they say will have no dire consequences (ever!). The Inflation Reduction Act, for example, was estimated to cost $400 million but will cost something more like $1 trillion. It also does lots of things that are not inflation-reducing at all, not even if you squint. As Reason's Eric Boehm has argued, it's basically "a pared-down version of what Biden originally pitched as the 'Build Back Better' plan—it leaves aside much of the original bill's spending, but it maintains a huge corporate tax increase, huge spending on green energy initiatives, and a plan to swell the ranks of IRS agents." Some pandemic relief programs promoted by Democrats have either been wasteful or plagued by fraud, like the Employee Retention Credit ("The I.R.S. is freezing the program because of fears about fraud and abuse," reports the Times) and the Paycheck Protection Program, which Reason has covered extensively.
-copy-29e15046.jpeg?w=600)
