A Little More About Mimi Hall

Yesterday I snarked about Mimi Hall of the USA Today, claiming she was unclear on the concept when she wrote about how the deficits will hinder President Obama's political goals. When I wrote it, I knew I was being unfair to her and that she was just one of tens of millions of people who have the same detached view of the debt.

If you read the editorials, mostly on the left, but also sometimes on the right, it seems as though people think that the government debt is not their problem. It's spoken of in the abstract about this kind of bond or that amount of borrowing and the numbers are incomprehensibly cosmic - they don't translate down into individual human terms easily. Allow me to try to do so.

A trillion dollar deficit means that each of us just borrowed another $3,000. Ths year's $1.6T deficit will mean that we all just borrowed $4800. A family of four just borrowed $19,200. It's our debt, money that the government borrowed in our name. There's no plan at all to pay it off. Next year, according to the Administration, that family of four will borrow another $18,000. The year after that it will probably be close to $15,000. In three years, a family of four will be an additional $70,000 in debt with no plan to pay it off.

When Mimi and the others write about the deficit and talk about this or that politician's hopes being dashed they're dealing with abstract, second- or third-order effects in their lives. Even if Barack Obama was my best friend in the whole, wide world, I'd be totally enraged that the dingbat put me $70,000 farther into debt. I wouldn't care too much about his political hopes and dreams.