I first became a Wall Street correspondent 34 years ago, after Black Monday, Oct. 19, 1987. An element in that day’s panic was an undertow of concern about ballooning public spending. A debt clock loomed over Times Square, alarming passersby, its flickering red line of figures looking like what it was, a danger signal. I recall people’s eyes standing on stalks at the “telephone number” string of digits showing what we collectively owed. Public debt back then had reached $3 trillion.
Today, it’s $28 trillion, seven times as much. Yet although our fiscal condition is measurably much worse than it was a generation ago, debt barely registers on most politicians’ radars. They spend like proverbially intoxicated mariners. The Democratic Party does everything it can to increase borrowing and spending, working under the spell of a delusional but fashionable idea called Modern Monetary Theory, which posits that we can spend as much as we want without adverse consequences. Donald Trump won the presidency promising not to touch those misnamed “entitlements” that were in dire need of reform long before President George W. Bush’s efforts to do so went down in flames in 2005. The parties look the other way and pretend they don’t see the impending wreck, but that doesn’t mean it’ll come any later. Indeed, it ensures it will come sooner.
One of the last insistent voices for fiscal probity is now heading for the Capitol Hill exit. Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania will retire at the end of his second term in 2022. His interview with Brad Polumbo, our cover story this week, is a valedictory warning to the nation of the dire consequences we are heaping up for our future and for our children as we borrow not simply to meet emergencies but to finance a lifestyle more opulent than we can afford, and to fund an idleness to which we’ve become accustomed during the inertia of pandemic isolation. The financial trajectory is, Toomey says, “very bleak.”
The first thing President Biden did upon taking office, just 21 minutes after being sworn in, was fire a mild-mannered documentary maker, Michael Pack, who was, to those of us who have known him for many years, one of the most level-headed and likable men in Washington. His sin was to be running the U.S. Agency for Global Media and trying to return it to its mission rather than allowing it to continue spreading anti-American and biased left-wing propaganda around the world. Pack talks with Byron York about the taxpayer-funded abomination he tried to reform.
Becket Adams writes about the end of the affair between the liberal press and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and Jon Gabriel pulls the wraps off the yearslong fight between the Arizona Republican Party and grassroots Republican voters in the state.
Adrian Nathan West reviews Brief Lives of Idiots, Scott Beauchamp explores the role of the artist in “creating beauty out of brokenness,” James McElroy, in our On Culture column, has a technological nightmare, and Daniel Ross Goodman admires the remake of TV’s All Creatures Great and Small.
