We are told from time to time that we will eventually hit a crisis that will serve to wake us up. But, if anything, the opposite is likely true, for instead of prompting sobriety and retrenchment, the crises of recent years have served only to make things worse. The 2008 crash prompted a mitigation effort that not only cost trillions of dollars on its own terms, but led in turn to the creation of a host of new spending programs that have now been absorbed into the baseline. The same is true of the federal government’s COVID-19 relief efforts, which cost $5 trillion in and of themselves and are now being used as justification for a “rebuilding” agenda that will add another $4 trillion on top of that. One might have expected that, assessing the scene in January of 2021, the Democratic Party would have said, “Well, I guess all the money is gone.” But it didn’t.

And why would it, given that we are now so far down the hole that the public has come to see astronomical numbers as mere abstractions? Even ten years ago, a trillion dollars was regarded as an enormous amount of money — enough, perhaps, to disqualify any spending proposal at the first hurdle. Now? Nobody seems to care. $2 trillion? $4 trillion? $10 trillion? None of it is deemed real anyway, so what does it matter? Balance sheets, interest rates, opportunity costs — whatever. Tell me, instead: What’s the right thing to do?