Life After Debt

Today NPR reported on a possible crisis facing the government back in 2000: The potential that the U.S. would pay off all of its debt. Irrefutably we dodged that one - a decade later, the public now holds over $10 trillion in national debt.

"There's such a thing as too much debt," said economist Jason Seligman. "But also such a thing, perhaps, as too little."

Seligman wrote a report, "Life After Debt" as the country was running a budget surplus at the end of the Clinton Administration. As explained in the NPR clip, there were challenges in conceiving a world without U.S. debt: the lack of Treasury bonds would have sent ripple effects through the global economy.

Two recessions, two tax cuts, and two wars later, clearly we took the diverging path from our debt-free national projection.

Here's a link to the full report written in 2000 and released this week.