Our federal debt currently stands at an astronomical $36,400,000,000,000. It has gone up another $2T in just the last 3 months. Everyone with even the slightest amount of common sense – and even the occasional economist – understands that our current fiscal trajectory is unsustainable. The people we send to Washington to be smart, are behaving in a very uninformed way – assuming they will never run out of other people’s money to spend.
Is the accumulation of such debt more than simply a financial issue? Is it also a moral issue? Answering that question requires an examination of the fundamentals of borrowing, and application of guidance provided by the world’s foremost ethicist, God.
There is nothing inherently evil in loaning or borrowing money. The devil (literally and figuratively) is in the details.
If I go to the bank and borrow money to buy a house, I enter into a contract in which I and the bank consensually make a trade of fair value. I get up front money for a house in which to raise my family, and the bank makes a profit over time. The arrangement benefits both parties of the transaction.
If I violate the contract by defaulting on the loan, my property is repossessed in an attempt by the lender to recoup losses. Nobody is affected by the failure of the contract, other than those who accepted the risks of the agreement. [Unless the bank fails and the government bails it out – which is another morality discussion.]
But the ethics of borrowing becomes more complicated when the federal government is borrowing money on our behalf (as the self-governed republic that we are).
The United States government has frequently borrowed money to cover short-term financial needs. In fact, our republic started out by assuming $43M of debt, which was acquired to fight the American Revolution. But early in our republic, our leadership considered it a moral obligation to retire debts as expeditiously as possible. That initial revolutionary war debt was paid off during the administration of Andrew Jackson in 1836.
Unfortunately, modern politicians have not shared our founder’s sense of fiscal responsibility. The national debt has been on an upward, and accelerating, trajectory since 1931. It broke the trillion-dollar barrier in 1982, and will top $37T in 2025. The Treasury Department hides the magnitude of the problem by publishing debt as a percentage of GDP. But in absolute dollars, the debt has been increasing for almost 9 decades.
Neither political party shows any inclination to retire the debt. Both Democrats and Republicans seem intent to pass the obligations of the debt on to those who never consented to it: our children and grandchildren. Is that moral, or a violation of God’s teachings?
God ranks "not taking each other’s stuff" pretty high on the list of things not to do. “Thou shalt not commit anthropogenic climate change” didn’t make it into the Bible. Neither did “Thou shalt not mis-pronoun the gender fluid.” But “Thou shalt not steal” made it into the top ten of his commandments. It seems the idea of property rights isn’t just a ruse created by evil capitalists to rationalize their business practices.
It may seem sophomoric to state the obvious, but bear with me I have a point to make. Theft is not a business transaction. It is the taking of property without the voluntary participation of one party, and without any fair trade of value.
When the federal government borrows money it’s different than a private loan, because it fails the tests of fair trade of value and consent.
Was there a fair trade of value when the government spent
- $42B on the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program, and then failed to connect even a single household;
- $7.5B to construct a nationwide network of EV chargers, yet built only 8 stations;
- $2B for Planned Parenthood to help women exercise their right to execute their young; and
- Half-a-billion dollars for PBS and NPR to spread government propaganda?
I could go on for hundreds of pages (as DOGE certainly will), but you get the idea. We accumulated our massive debt not to acquire anything of durable value to pass on to future generations, but simply to flush money down the toilet of bureaucratic waste and political payoffs.
Here’s where the practice moves from mismanagement to evil: Neither party plans to retire that debt. Instead, the service obligation (i.e. interest payments) is being passed on to people who never consented to it – our progeny.
The current interest on the national debt tops $1T per year. Divided by the number of citizens in America, that amounts to $2,985 dollars per year in interest payments for every man, woman, and child – forever, unless something changes. When my grandson marries and has a couple of kids, his family will be FORCED to pay (on average) $11,900 per year (in taxes), just to pay the interest on the loans which our government took out in our name.
Those funds will be confiscated from him and his family, without consent, and without receiving anything of value in return. That rather meets the definition of theft – no? Are we morally accountable for what we sanctioned the federal government to do in our name? In the future, will the Almighty be asking us what part of “Thou shalt not steal” we didn’t understand?
Thomas Jefferson once said
I consider a permanent public debt as a canker inevitably fatal.
This canker has been festering for almost a century untreated. The US credit rating has been downgraded, and debt-driven inflation is eating through family finances like a cancer. Yet our elected representatives in Washington act like raising the debt limit is “business as usual.”
As I spend time playing with my grandchildren I keep wondering: How much of their hard-earned income will the taxman steal to pay for the spending binges of the 21st century?
This problem is never going to be solved by sending people to
Washington on a prayer that “this time they’ll be responsible with our money.” We need a systemic change: a Constitutional amendment imposing fiscal morality.
An Amendment is what we need, and an Article V convention is the means to get it. Visit this link to see how.
