One thing that puzzles me about the current controversy is that almost everyone talks as though hitting the debt limit means that the federal government must default on interest payments on its debt. So far as I can tell, there is no reason that should be the case. Federal revenue is about eleven times net interest payments, seven times interest payments including intergovernmental interest (such as the interest the government pays the social security fund for "reserves" that the government has borrowed and spent). So there is more than enough revenue to continue paying interest on the debt—provided it isn't all spent for other things.
Not only is default on the debt not necessary to deal with the debt limit, it is not sufficient, not nearly sufficient. Net interest payments are about 220 billion dollars a year, the current deficit is running about 750 billion a year, so if the government stops paying interest it would still have to cut other expenditures by more than half a trillion dollars a year to balance the budget. On the other hand, total federal expenditure is running a little under four trillion dollars a year. So if the government continued to pay interest on the debt and reduced every expenditure other than interest by about 20%, the budget would balance.
I don't expect it to happen and am not terribly interested in arguments about whether it ought to happen, since they rapidly turn into arguments about macro-economics, which is not my field. But simply as a matter of logical possibility, the government could balance the budget while continuing to pay interest on the debt and it cannot balance the budget by defaulting on that interest unless it also sharply reduces other expenditure. Facts which seem to be ignored in almost all public discussions of the situation.
No comments:
Post a Comment