Bob Kerrey is a Democrat and two-term U.S. Senator from Nebraska. He is co-chair of the bipartisan Concord Coalition.
Of course, it's impossible to cover every worthy topic in the 90 minutes allotted for Thursday's debate between President Biden and former President Donald Trump, but no matter what else is discussed, the evening will be a missed opportunity if one key word isn't mentioned.
The debt, the national debt, is not the elephant in the room. It is the elephant in the room, with its noisy donkeys. A growing embarrassment for years, it is now a national nightmare and an ever-growing stain on the country's economic and social future. CNN reporters Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, who are hosting the presidential race, should make sure they tell us what they will do about it.
Here are some facts:
The national debt has doubled since 1994, from 48 percent to 97 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), a ratio that is fast approaching the record level at the end of World War II. Under current law, the Congressional Budget Office projects that the debt will reach a staggering 166 percent of GDP in 2054. In a June 18 projection, the Congressional Budget Office projected that federal spending solely on interest on the debt will be $892 billion this year. That's a $22 billion increase from the CBO's projection just four months ago, making interest the second-largest item in the federal budget, surpassing defense ($849 billion) and Medicare ($858 billion). According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization, interest payments this year will exceed spending on veterans, education, and transportation combined. The budget deficit is expected to be $1.9 trillion this year, up $300 billion from estimates a few months ago, and is expected to rise to $2.9 trillion per year within a decade. Two of the three major ratings agencies (Standard & Poor's and Fitch) have downgraded U.S. government debt from the highest rating of AAA to AA+.
Faced with these harsh truths, serious observers can no longer dismiss concerns about debt with reassuring excuses about “only we owe it” or money that “will go away with economic growth.” Instead, the Government Accountability Office has called the current fiscal course “unsustainable,” the Comptroller General has said we face “risks to economic stability,” and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has warned that the country is heading “forward to a cliff” with the “most predictable” economic crisis in history. Even Nobel Prize-winning economist and longtime deficit dove Paul Krugman wrote last October that “severe deficit reduction, which was a bad idea 10 years ago, is a good idea now.”
Some lawmakers have suggested forming a new bipartisan committee to come up with solutions and present them to Congress. Their intentions may be understandable. But I co-chaired just such a committee in 1994, along with Senator John C. Danforth (R-Missouri). And although we worked hard, as the Social Security website puts it, the “committee” “could not reach an agreement and was terminated without making any recommendations.” Since then, we have had the Medicare Commission (1999), the Social Security Commission (2001), the Simpson-Bowles Commission (2010), and the Congressional “Super Commission” (2011).
We don't need another commission. We need the President and Congress to provide patriotic leadership — and their moral duty. This month, on the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings, we heard again about the sacrifices made by the Greatest Generation to save the world from Nazi barbarism. With every dollar of debt, we set a different example and sacrifice future generations because of our own irresponsibility.
The longer we wait, the harder this becomes. Our nation's rapidly aging population is slowing economic growth, reducing potential revenues and increasing spending on retirement and health care benefits. Meanwhile, partisan divisions, bad enough in the 1990s, have apparently become even more entrenched. What were once routine tasks, like raising the debt ceiling to avoid a government default, have become protracted cliff-edge exercises.
While the timing of some of the potential disasters we face is impossible to predict, others are all but certain. Social Security will be insolvent by 2035. Congress' strategy of doing nothing will result in a 17 percent across-the-board benefit cut in 2036. Similarly, Medicare will have to cut payments to providers by 11 percent by 2037, jeopardizing access to health care.
Of course, Democrats and Republicans will continue to disagree about how to address these issues, but resolving differences is the purpose of the legislative process.
For nearly a quarter century, the American people have watched our leaders do nothing about this situation, only make it worse. Danforth and I are tired of waiting, and on behalf of the generations that will come after us, we are outraged.
