How Bad Is Our Debt Problem and Will a Deal Fix It?

Posted on Dec 30, 2012

Flickr/401(K) 2012

By Theodoric Meyer, ProPublica

(Page 2)

Other economists — including Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, who studied eight centuries’ worth of financial crises for their book “This Time Is Different” — argue that countries with debt-to-GDP ratios above a certain level tend to experience slower economic growth. Reinhart and Rogoff suggest the level is around 90 percent of GDP — which the U.S. is rapidly approaching. A recent Congressional Research Service report concluded that while the debt-to-GDP ratio can’t keep rising forever, “it can rise for a time.” The report continued:

It is hard to predict at what point bond holders would deem it to be unsustainable. A few other advanced economies have debt-to-GDP ratios higher than that of the United States. Some of those countries in Europe have recently seen their financing costs rise to the point that they are unable to finance their deficits solely through private markets. But Japan has the highest debt-to-GDP ratio of any advanced economy, and it has continued to be able to finance its debt at extremely low costs.

How does all this fit into the fiscal cliff? Would a deal to avert it fix our debt problem?

Actually, going over the fiscal cliff would almost singlehandedly erase the deficit. Tax rates would shoot up, and the fiscal cliff’s indiscriminate budget cuts would slash military and safety-net spending alike.

The problem is that all those tax increases and spending cuts would likely throw the economy back into a recession, causing the deficit to balloon again. “The economy will, I think, go off a cliff,” said Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman.

(For more detail, see The Washington Post’s exhaustive fiscal cliff explainer.)

What the two sides are trying to do is identify cuts that are ultimately deep enough to bring down the deficit — and thus, eventually, the debt — without stalling the economy. But negotiations collapsed last week after John Boehner, the Republican House speaker, tried and failed to pass a “Plan B” alternative to the president’s proposal in the House. Obama is set to meet with congressional leaders today to try to strike a deal to block at least some of the cliff’s impact by Monday night. But its prospects seem dim.

“I have to be very honest,” Sen. Harry Reid, the majority leader, said on Thursday. “I don’t know timewise how it can happen now.”

Of course, some analysts have pointed out that people on both the Republican and the Democratic sides may actually want to move the cliff just slightly down the road into the next Congress, which convenes Thursday, Jan. 3. The advantages: Boehner can be safely re-elected as Speaker before he has to do serious twisting of arms of fellow GOP House members to get their votes for any compromise plan. And there will be a few more Democrats in the House and the Senate for the White House to rely on in enlisting the votes it needs to ratify any such deal. The disadvantage: Delay makes the risk of miscalculation greater for either or both sides — and for the public.

 

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