Don’t Worry About the Federal Deficit | The Walrus
Politicians often tell us that government debt will cause hardship
because our kids will have to pay it back. Wrong. For a household, debt
is most often accumulated when earners are young and then paid back
through middle age; if it isn’t, your kids inherit that financial
burden. But a country does not face the same life-cycle patterns as do
individual families—countries don’t grow old, retire, and die.
Government debt is simply not the same as the thirty-year mortgage on
your house; the federal government has no fiscal obligation to reach
zero debt over any short horizon.