There’s No Need To Be Chicken Little About the Debt

Congressional negotiators are working feverishly to complete a coronavirus relief bill before Christmas, but they’re having a difficult time because Republicans are insisting that the total bill come in under a trillion dollars. Why? Because, they say, they’re concerned about the federal debt.

They shouldn’t be. First off, here’s a comparison of US federal debt to our peer countries before the pandemic:

And here are interest payments on the federal debt over the past 60 years:

Neither one of these suggests any need for panic. As long as investors are eager to buy our debt—and they very much are—we’ll do fine. What’s more, investors will continue to be eager to buy our debt as long as our economy is fundamentally sound. They care much more about this than they do about whether interest outlays increase by a tenth of a percent or so, and strong stimulus spending is what keeps the economy humming until we emerge from the pandemic.

For what it’s worth, I’d also like to repeat something I’ve said before: If you combine the CARES Act with the likely $900 billion from the upcoming relief bill, it comes to $3.1 trillion over the course of 18 months. That’s about $2.1 trillion per year, or 10 percent of GDP. This is more than three times higher than the Obama stimulus bill. Republicans may be misguided in their supposed concern about the debt, but macroeconomically we’re really not doing too badly this time around.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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