The Perils of Debt Complacency

CAMBRIDGE – “What a government spends the public pays for. There is no such thing as an uncovered deficit.” So said John Maynard Keynes in A Tract on Monetary Reform.

But Robert Skidelsky, the author of a magisterial three-volume biography of Keynes, disagrees. In a recent commentary entitled “The Scarecrow of National Debt,” Skidelsky offered a rather patronizing narrative, in a tone usually reserved for young children and pets, about his aged, old-fashioned, and financially illiterate friend’s baseless anxiety about the burden placed on future generations by the rising level of government debt.