Fear of debt is absolutely ingrained and are used to push budget cuts

“The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of a People’s Economy,” Kindle Edition (accessed 4/26/2023)

The truth is, we’re fine. The debt clock on West 43rd Street simply displays a historical record of how many dollars the federal government has added to people’s pockets without subtracting (taxing) them away. Those dollars are being saved in the form of US Treasuries. If you’re lucky enough to own some, congratulations! They’re part of your wealth. While others may refer to it as a debt clock, it’s really a US dollar savings clock. But you won’t hear that from anyone in Congress. You can imagine why. Think about what would happen if a member of Congress returned to his or her district and tried to convince a roomful of panicked constituents that everything they deeply fear about our ballooning national debt is really a big nothing burger. With every other voice of authority delivering exactly the opposite message, the words of the soothsayer would go over like a lead balloon. Sometimes, as Mark Twain put it, “it’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”

Even if their own thinking wasn’t so broken, there are reasons why members of Congress might not want the rest of us to see the so-called debt for what it really is—nothing more than those yellow interest-bearing dollars called US Treasuries that we talked about in Chapter 1. For some politicians, attaching the word debt to a really big number creates the perfect foil. Meganumaphobia—the fear of large numbers—might not be a medically recognized anxiety disorder, but plenty of politicians seem to think it’s real enough.

I remember being struck by this during a meeting with members of the US Senate Budget Committee. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) had just released its 2015–2025 budget outlook, and the senators were pouring over the report’s findings.2 The CBO had projected that the fiscal deficit would stand at $1.1 trillion and the gross federal debt would reach $27.3 trillion in 2025. The committee’s chairman, Mike Enzi, found the numbers startling. But not startling enough. He was worried that by using decimal points instead of commas, the report would fail to stoke the right emotional response from our citizenry. To dramatize the numbers, he suggested that the CBO be required to write the numbers out in long form: $1,100,000,000,000 and $27,300,000,000,000.

Recall that Senator Enzi ran a shoe-sale business before getting involved in politics. As a businessman, he must have understood the importance of a good marketing campaign. A more comfortable fit, a wider selection, a more fashionable design. Finding the right message to appeal to shoppers is critical for sustaining your customer base. Tap into the right emotions, and a good marketing campaign will bring people in off the streets. If you think about it, Enzi was basically looking for a way to market information about the government’s finances in a way that would elicit a certain emotional reaction from voters. Once politicians like Senator Enzi succeed in making us anxious about the sheer size of this thing we label debt, they can weaponize that fear in a number of ways.

By persuading voters that something must be done about these big scary numbers, politicians can push for cuts to popular programs, like Social Security and Medicare.3 Winning support for an agenda that calls for painful cuts requires sustaining public outrage over our national finances. These are programs that benefit enormous constituencies. People will fight tooth and nail to protect them. Unless, of course, they can be convinced that there is no alternative. That we must act to “fix the debt” before it’s too late.