Azeem Ibrahim is a Research Scholar at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Member of the Board of Directors at the Institute of Social Policy Understanding and Chairman and CEO of Ibrahim Associates.
The National Debt is a confusing issue. Unlike schools and hospitals, you can’t see it, so you can’t see when it gets worse. Unlike crime, it doesn’t threaten your physical safety, so you can’t feel that something urgently needs to be done. Unlike climate change, there are no scientists to back up the claims for how urgently we need to deal with it. Unlike abortion or euthanasia, nobody has a best friend or relative who has suffered deep emotional scars from having had an experience related to it. And unlike bombings or natural disasters, it never gets concentrated coverage, so it never suddenly seems urgent. Rather, it is terribly urgent, but only a little bit more urgent each news-cycle.
All of this makes the issue of the national debt hard to understand. But that’s only half of it. Once you have learned about just how high the mountain of money which we are asking future generations to pay in our name actually is, you still face disagreement on how big a problem that is. Some economists argue that even though the national debt looks eye-wateringly big, we don’t need to worry about it. Others argue that the national debt is a really big problem right now. That kind of argument never happens with crime figures.
Let me tell you straight: the national debt is a really big problem right now. It has its claws round the neck of the British economy, and they are tightening. The reasons why do not make the news enough.
Each year, like any person, household, or company, the government has income and outgoings. The income, of course, is what you pay it in tax, the outgoings are what it spends. The difference between the government and people, households, and companies, is that they know that their outgoings can only exceed their income up to a point. After that, companies know they will go bust, families know they will have their homes repossessed, and people know they will get a negative credit rating or start having their stuff taken away by the bailiffs.
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