Not political will, but economic understanding

"The problem is to have the political will to take the necessary measures."

- Milton Friedman

There are two kinds of people: Those who see this graph and think I'm complaining about the Federal debt. And those who haven't seen the graph yet.

Figure 1: Showing the Growth of the Federal Debt above and beyond its pre-1975 Trend

I'm not complaining about the Federal debt. I'm looking at a change in the trend of that debt: when the change occurred, and how big a change it was. I didn't say it was a bad thing. I didn't say it was a good thing. That's on you.

I'm just trying to understand the graph. I want to know what happened, how it happened, and why. But what's to understand? Everybody else on the planet already knows that the Federal debt exists because the government spends more money that it brings in.

Hey, I can do the math. It's elementary-school arithmetic. When they spend more than they bring in, they get deeper in debt. You don't have to know anything about Federal spending and revenue. Once you know that the Federal debt is growing, you already know they're spending more than they bring in.

But why? The standard story seems to be that they don't have the political will to stop spending so much. It's a story of political will. And maybe it makes sense, far as it goes. But I need to hear a tale of the interaction of economic forces.


Political will? At Governing, Mark Funkhouser writes:

When you hear a public official or pundit say that the reason this or that desirable thing cannot be done is because of a lack of political will, what you are actually hearing is that person blaming other people’s moral failings.

Hey. People obviously disagree with each other. It happens. Political will is the power to see differences of opinion as the moral failings of other people. This doesn't seem to me to be a good thing. Political will can turn any little disagreement into a problem that cannot be solved.

Stranger yet is Funkhouser's conclusion:

Rather than expressing dismay or scorn or outrage over the way the political system works, people who actually want to effect change need to learn how to use that system. As LBJ understood so well, they need to learn to create political will.

This conclusion is echoed in the article's title and the line just below it:

What People Get Wrong About ‘Political Will’
It’s not some innate quality -- good leaders must create it.

We need more of it?  Political will -- "born of a lack of insight and analysis," Funkhouser says -- is just an easy way to criticize the other guy. You don't need to know anything except who you want to disagree with.

This all leads me to think that maybe we should dump the "political will" explanation. It's not doing us any good. It reduces arguments to finger-pointing, and it makes differences irreconcilable. I don't see the benefit in creating more political will.

Where does this leave us? It seems we need a different story. And since our focus is on debt and the problems debt creates, the story ought to be about economic forces.