Why the national debt might finally matter
(Uh oh)
Hello!
In a moment of deep economic uncertainty created by our tariff-loving president, suddenly, our national debt has become much more important. Important enough that, this week, we have decided to teach ourselves everything we can about it – how America first created its national debt, and how it got out of control.
As promised, I’m keeping this very short. The newsletter is mostly here right now to remind people that a new episode is out and provide a place to make comments. Please be polite, both to each other and us, and try to assume good intentions.
Hope you enjoy this one, we learned a lot making it.
Happy Friday,
PJ
Just a note to say that I very much support you sending out short (even super duper short) newsletters around each episode. It ties the Search Engine experience together! I'd actually missed a few episodes when they were published because there wasn't an accompanying newsletter. I know that each added step of publishing a show can be onerous and sometimes feel not completely necessary, but I think that for your show, where much of your audience/community is in conversation with you, it's very much worth the effort. For me, at least, it doesn't feel like a "promo," but rather a very welcome update from a project I care about. Sorry to belabor this point with a long-ass public message about something so small – this is why I should probably be using AI to edit everything I write.
PJ, your episode got so close to a huge idea: the real risk isn't the size of the debt, it's what we spend on — but framing borrowing as the government's "funding" still reinforces the old (and wrong) idea that the government is like a household. After the US left the gold standard in 1971, they've been spending by creating money, not borrowing it first — and bonds are just tools to manage interest rates, not to "fund" spending. A follow-up episode could totally flip how people think about debt and inflation today, especially if you brought on someone like Stephanie Kelton (The Deficit Myth) or Warren Mosler (founder of Modern Monetary Theory) to unpack it. I love your story telling style (I think our brains work similarly) and would really love to hear you delve into this topic as there are so many interesting aspects (look up tally sticks for instance).