Ira Stoll: Five Facts About the Debt

Over at Reason, Ira Stoll has a solid post up on how the world won’t end if no debt ceiling deal is reached.

You can fool around with inflation and with the percentage of GDP and with the revenue side of the equation, but the bottom line is that the federal government is spending about double what it was at the end of the Clinton administration. For all the clamor on the left to bring back the Clinton-era top tax rates, there are few, if any, politicians in Washington talking about bringing back the Clinton-era spending levels.

Funny how that works, isn’t it? Read the whole thing, it’s quick and worth it.

All of that said, we do need a deal. We just need a deal that doesn’t raise taxes while it does meaningfully cut spending. This business of counting the war wind-downs as spending “cuts,” and having those be the only cuts, strikes me as the usual Washington flim-flam.