George Will Highlights Potential Dangerous Path Ahead

In an opinion piece for The Washington Post, columnist George Will writes about the six paths to a fiscal disaster outlined in our recent paper, “What Would a Fiscal Crisis Look Like?”.

Will discusses each fiscal crisis in turn – financial crisis, inflation crisis, austerity crisis, currency crisis, default crisis, and gradual crisis – and how our rising national debt could set them off. Will pays particular concern to a gradual crisis, which he considers to be the “most probable, and most ominous” because unlike the other major crises, it is not action-forcing. As Will also mentions, it can be difficult to get elected politicians to bear short-term costs to address large, long-term issues.

A gradual crisis would be anesthetizing, rather than an action-forcing, cymbal-crash event that could stimulate recuperative reforms of U.S. political culture. Instead, this culture would become more toxic. Political power would be fought for, and wielded, with the desperate ruthlessness of a zero-sum competition in which one faction’s gains must equal other factions’ losses.

While it is impossible to know if or when a fiscal crisis could occur, policymakers can take steps to lower deficits and put the debt on a downward path by reducing spending, raising revenue, enacting trust fund solutions, finding health care savings, and implementing other pro-growth policies. And in Will’s words, providing this information to policymakers now can hopefully "galvanize congressional action to forestall a darkening fiscal future.”

Read the full piece here and read our full paper, “What Would a Fiscal Crisis Look Like?”.