Former U.S. Sen. Robert Stafford was no friend of President Ronald Reagan. He was one of the last liberal Republicans in the Senate and, due to his seniority, exercised power disproportionate to the diminutive state that elected him. And true to the Vermont stereotype, he openly challenged the popular president whenever his displeasure over national policy required it.

Unlike many of their peers after decades in the heart of the Washington power structure, in 1989 Bob and Helen Stafford retired to his hometown of Rutland. Shortly after their return, I had an opportunity to visit with Bob and the subject turned to his concern over the growing national debt.

“A lot of folks blame it on Reagan’s tax cuts,” I offered.

“No, that’s not it at all,” he said. “Reagan was a small-government Republican. He knew even with eight years in office he could not meaningfully reduce the size of the federal government. He believed that the only way to force the government to shrink was to starve it for resources.

“The tax cuts were, yes, to stimulate the economy. But the second purpose was to force Congress to reduce spending. It never occurred to him or anyone else we would be so reckless as to simply keep spending and just borrow the money.”

The federal debt stood at $3.2 trillion when Stafford said that. Today it stands at $27 trillion. Even after adjusting for inflation, we have added about 21 trillion current dollars to the debt since 1990. And this does not include any of the unsupported spending Joe Biden has stoked.

I know retired millionaire couples who have received their $2,800 in phase 3 Covid relief payments. I see local businesses begging for applicants to fill jobs at the same time unemployment benefits are seemingly extended indefinitely.

Clearly there are folks who still need help, but this? Where is the outrage? Where are the accusations of reckless spending? Does anyone still care about tomorrow?

And now we are all supposed to salute the new $2 trillion infrastructure bill of which only $621 billion (less than a third) is actually for infrastructure.

I have heard the experts explain all about why we don’t need to fear inflation because it is tied more to expectations than round-the-clock money printing. I don’t claim to be an expert but I have been around a long time and know when the experts proclaim “the death of the business cycle,” a recession is right around the corner. Whenever time-proven principles are broadly dismissed, they reassert themselves with a vengeance.

The pandemic was a national emergency requiring a dramatic response. The emergency is passing but our leaders are paying no attention, leveraging the receding crisis to justify spending that is light-years beyond “reckless.”

Where are the deficit hawks today? Will no one on the national stage challenge this? For the sake of our future, I hope so. Because the economic crisis we are creating now may dwarf anything we saw in 2020.

 

By Commentary

Apr 13 2021

Editor’s note: This commentary is by Jeffrey Wennberg, recently retired commissioner of the Rutland Department of Public Works. He is former mayor of Rutland, was commissioner of environmental conservation under Gov. Jim Douglas, and was a consultant with the Center for Climate Strategies in Washington. D.C., for whom he managed numerous state, regional and national studies of cap-and-trade policy proposals.