High Stakes Gamble

The title of this article might suggest to many readers that I’m referring to President Donald Trump’s controversial moves to level the international trading field, and his equally radical attempts to cancel wasteful government spending in order to put our economic house in order. Some wags (including yours truly) have likened the latter effort to Hercules’ legendary Labor of Cleansing the Augean Stables – an apt description of our situation as ever was.

My reference, however, applies to Democrats’ heroic efforts to keep the federal spigot wide open, adding trillions to a federal debt that is already so gigantic that it defies the understanding of all but a few citizens who can grasp numbers on this scale.

To illustrate the latter point – if you had a trillion dollars, and could spend a million dollars a day, how long would it take you to spend the trillion? Answer: just over 2,700 years. But that hypothetical problem completely ignores the matter of earned interest. At a modest rate of 3%, the annual interest earned by your $1 trillion would come to $30 billion, which beggars the mere $365 million you’re spending each year. So hypothetically, you could never spend your trillion. It would grow beyond human comprehension.

The (non-hypothetical) reality of our own federal situation is that we have a national debt of $36 trillion, on which we now pay approximately $1 trillion in interest each year to our lenders. But we are “paying” it with more borrowed money, so the total debt is now “galloping” along at a trillion more each year – a growth so stupendous that even the wealthiest among us can see that we simply can’t continue in this way.

Democrats are long-time champions of big federal spending. It has been their political mantra and success formula since FDR’s time. The legendary New Deal Big Guy – with cigarette tipped at a “jaunty” angle – had no concerns about growing the national debt. “After all,” he famously said, “we owe it to ourselves.” FDR spent enough to ensure his election to four presidential terms. His big-spending governance lasted so long that millions of citizens came to regard it as “normality.” Under his guidance, we left the gold standard, saw inflation reach levels never seen before in this country, and were blessed with Democrat-controlled Congresses for most of 60 years.

What is the Big Stakes Gamble to which I refer? There are several aspects to it, which I’ll describe briefly in the following paragraphs.

1. TheArithmetic Gamble. Democrats rely on the fact that most voters won’t comprehend the staggering scale of arithmetic – as described above – that is in play. This applies especially to younger people whose poor mathematics education has left them unsure of whether 2 + 2 = 4. Dems know that the typical man-on-the-street looks at the number 36 trillion and sees 36 as the only quantity he can grasp. And it doesn’t look very scary. “Nothing to do with me,” he decides, as he goes about his business. (As Thomas Gray famously said, “When ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.”)
2. The Big-spending Gamble. This relates to Democrats’ venerable political strategy, which aims at getting enough voters hooked on government money to keep Dems in charge. As we saw in the Biden administration, this typically produces inflation of both commodity prices and wages – sometimes to an alarming degree. Democrats love inflation because it pushes millions of taxpayers into higher tax-brackets, which produces more tax-revenue. It also makes wage-earners happy – at least for a time – because they have more money in their pockets and they feel richer. The fact that their dollars have less buying power registers only later, by degrees.
3. The Cure Worse than Disease Gamble reflects Democrats expectation that their political opponents will periodically gain political power and try to correct the economic mess. By definition, this involves stopping the runaway, big-spending train and balancing the federal budget. When this inevitably happens, as it has at present, Democrats bank on growing voter-dissatisfaction, over the “pain” inflicted by the economic austerity. They campaign on voters’ disquiet, and become a reliable cheering squad whenever it looks like a recession might be around the corner. I am not the first analyst to note that a solid constituency for economic austerity does not exist. Democrats always expect to regain power when anyone tries to rein in spending and balance the budget. Indeed, they fully expect this to happen in the elections of both 2026 and 2028.
4. The Maybe a Federal Bankruptcy Won’t Really Happen Gamble is something of an outlier among Democrats who simply don’t recognize any need to inflict the pain of economic austerity on their faithful afficionados of big government and big spending. They are an unknowable combination of both real and willful ignorance – reminiscent of a long-time New Deal Democrat in my acquaintance who always pooh-poohed the idea that the Social Security program might someday run dry. “Oh, there’ll always be plenty of money there,” he liked to say.
5. Blame the GOP will be Democrats’ fallback gamble, should all other gambles come up “craps.” They count on Republicans to be left holding the bag when the federal debt finally reaches a level where no more lenders can be found to finance new debt. Bankers call it bankruptcy. This is the most dangerous gamble of all, because it risks the complete destruction of our way of life and Constitutional self-governance. It’s easy to see that such an economic crash is the actual objective of far-leftist elements who believe that the America we know and love must be destroyed before a glorious new socialist paradise can rise from the rubble.

These are desperate and dangerous times.

“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” (Isaiah 5:20)

“Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.” (I Peter 5:8)