Explain something to me, cousins. This federal deficit of yours — why have you all suddenly gone so quiet about it?

For the better part of the past decade, the fact that the Washington was spending a lot more than it raised was, quite rightly, the top issue in American politics. Defense chiefs spoke of the national debt as the single biggest threat to U.S. security, and they had a point. The interest payments to China were funding the bulk of that country’s military budget. Concerned citizens took to the streets in an extraordinary manifestation of America’s individualist tradition, the Tea Party. They demanded tax and spending cuts, a lowering of entitlements, a return to fiscal sanity.