Everett Dirksen (R-Ill.), the Senate minority leader for nearly 11 years until his death in September 1969, had a famously foghorn voice with which he supposedly intoned, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” Some people say he actually said “a million here, a million there …” Either way, or neither (the Dirksen Congressional Center in his hometown of Pekin, Ill., finds no evidence of his saying either), Dirksen’s supposed attempt at alarming the nation about government spending seems prehistoric.
A million seconds ago was about 11 days and 14 hours ago. Someone who is now 31½ years old was born a billion seconds ago. A trillion seconds was 31,688 years ago, about 19,000 years before the invention of farming, a prerequisite for civilization.
Speaking of the distant past, you might remember the May drama surrounding raising the debt ceiling from $31.4 trillion. The ceiling was not raised; it was suspended until after the next election, which was prudent, considering the velocity of the red ink torrent. Last month, the debt soared past the $32 trillion mark, up from $31 trillion in just 36 weeks. As Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, says, “We can’t even get through a single fiscal year anymore without adding a trillion dollars in debt.”
The pace probably will accelerate as the growth of borrowing puts upward pressure on interest rates, and as debt service becomes an ever-larger portion of the federal budget — around 2029, larger than the defense budget. By 2051, interest will be the largest item in the budget. Inflation, a consequence of fiscal mismanagement, makes itself worse by increasing spending on entitlements with benefits indexed to inflation. Inflation can usually be cured by a recession, but that would make the debt worse by depressing revenue.