America’s national debt would have horrified Ronald Reagan. When he inherited a nation on the cusp of an unnerving milestone of $1 trillion in debt in 1981, he described it as a problem that had grown “literally beyond our comprehension.”“We can leave our children with an unrepayable massive debt and a shattered economy, or we can leave them liberty in a land where every individual has the opportunity to be whatever God intended us to be,” Reagan said in his first televised address on the economy.
Fast forward to the present, and America’s total federal debt burden recently eclipsed $36 trillion, bigger than the entire economy. Over the past four decades, brief stretches of deficit-cutting enthusiasm have been overwhelmed by a largely bipartisan urge to overspend. Most surprising is how small a price we’ve paid for our improvidence. The children that Reagan worried about are now in their 40s and 50s, and they’ve fared…
