Well, here's something you don't see all the time: both Noah Smith and Matthew Yglesias are writing about how the national debt is a problem.
On Saturday, Noah Smith published "America is Heading for a Debtpocalypse" and then today Yglesias is out with "It's time to freak out about the national debt"
The increase in government borrowing costs mechanically pushes up spending, which makes the budget deficit worse. A rising budget deficit generates inflationary pressure. And inflation drives up interest rates since investors demand more compensation.
There's probably more to it, but I am not paying for a subscription and can't find a free version of the newsletter.
Noah Smith's article about debt began with a lengthy disclaimer saying that while it didn't seem like he was worried about the debt under Biden and he even had said he wasn't worried, he is worried now and was even worried then just not enough to make a big deal out of it.
His article has many charts and one of them is probably the most confusing chart I've seen all year:
But basically Smith also sees the problem being that interest on the national debt is killing us. But I'm curious if it's something that the general public feels as well. So I did a very light little bit of research, running google news search queries for the term "national debt" for each year in the last decade and measuring the results:
| year | term | results |
| 2016 | "national debt" | 5.8m |
| 2017 | "national debt" | 7.8m |
| 2018 | "national debt" | 8.4m |
| 2019 | "national debt" | 8.4m |
| 2020 | "national debt" | 8.2m |
| 2021 | "national debt" | 7.6m |
| 2022 | "national debt" | 7.7m |
| 2023 | "national debt" | 8.3m |
| 2024 | "national debt" | 7.4m |
| 2025 | "national debt" | 3.2m |
| 2026 | "national debt" | 7.7m* |
* estimated
This wasn't very conclusive, so I tried it with a few other terms as well:
| year | term | results |
| 2016 | "federal deficit" | 1290 |
| 2017 | "federal deficit" | 2690 |
| 2018 | "federal deficit" | 3560 |
| 2019 | "federal deficit" | 3450 |
| 2020 | "federal deficit" | 4650 |
| 2021 | "federal deficit" | 4470 |
| 2022 | "federal deficit" | 5070 |
| 2023 | "federal deficit" | 5360 |
| 2024 | "federal deficit" | 8050 |
| 2025 | "federal deficit" | 19600 |
| 2026 | "federal deficit" | 54279* |
*estimated
| year | term | results |
| 2016 | "government spending" | 28k |
| 2017 | "government spending" | 54k |
| 2018 | "government spending" | 55k |
| 2019 | "government spending" | 64k |
| 2020 | "government spending" | 85k |
| 2021 | "government spending" | 85k |
| 2022 | "government spending" | 119k |
| 2023 | "government spending" | 132k |
| 2024 | "government spending" | 211k |
| 2025 | "government spending" | 2.4m |
| 2026 | "government spending" | 6.6m* |
It's hard to know how much the slopocalypse has altered results (are there just more news articles about everything these days?), but I think there are some signs that deficit spending and the government debt are of more concern to the average joe than used to be the case.
Maybe Smith and Yglesias are the vanguard and we can look forward to much more discussion of fiscal responsibility in the months to come.
Circa 2022 is when I noticed the word "inflation" go mainstream in the media and around me. It's on everyone's lips ever since like an omnipresent background force, but it's easy to forget how absent it was in normie conversations before 2022.
It was occasionally dropped in different contexts, but was mostly some term people remembered from their highschool econ class, some sort of concept that's akin to a natural phenomenon like rain, sunshine and condensation. People almost never paused on inflation to care about the how and why.
Definitely different now, at least in what I've observed personally. Whether more people truly understand inflation and it's causes is another story. "Money supply" is still way too absent from the related conversations and then seeing all those people blame greedy grocers for price inflation tells me there's more learning to be done, heh.
Might it be function of your age and that of your peers? At least partially?
I felt the same, but my year was somewhere around the turn of the millennium.
Not that I understood the concept any better at the time, but there sure seemed to be a distinct uptick when fuel prices rose sharply over a few years where I lived then.
Breaking $1/gallon on gas made an impression on me. Also the dot com bubble. That was probably the last time I remember mainstream discussion of inflation. I also remember discussion about deficits in the late '90s (although I don't remember why, Clinton balanced the budget if I recall).
I remember when it happened here some gas stations didnt have enough display panels to fit the new digit, so they'd paint or sticker an awkward "1" in front. I thought it was funny, like they had never planned for it to reach that many digits (ever?)
"inflation" certainly has become more of a mainstream topic, but I don't think very many normal people connect it to government spending. At least among the people I'm around, I'm more likely to hear inflation mentioned as some kind of weird phenomena, as if it was caused by the weather or the movement of tectonic plates.
it's the greedy corporations jacking up prices for everyone!
True. The word itself is misleading. Inflation makes you think of inflating a balloon, so prices rising for any reason = inflation.
Therefore greed causes inflation , tariffs cause inflation, and the government must step in and spend to curb inflation.
Almost nothing about the money supply being inflated
I recall Krugman writing quite a bit about the debt being a problem in 2017-ish, after eight years of calling everyone stupid for caring about it.
debt is only a problem when the people you don't like are in charge
2/3 of your tables uptick in 2022 when inflation was extra hot. I bet theres correlation to awareness with perceived inflation. A good table to add would be "money printing" or "debasement"
The DOGE op last year made sure to press on the talking point that government spending is what causes inflation. But that was also a segue to the fraud headlines this year, not all government spending has the same inflationary effect... government spending can be deflationary but the principal-agent problem effectively ensures that's never the case.
Here's the table for "money printing"
*estimated
But I'm pretty suspicious of my methodology. This trend towards an increase in results is visible in all the charts except the "national debt" one, but I wonder if Google doesn't do something to curtail results after they reach the some multiple of millions.
Also for the 2026 year I'm taking the number of results produced in the first third of the year extrapolating for a full year.
For instance, here is the result for the search term "noodles"
The slopocalypse is upon us.
I'm the furthest thing from a statician but that looks like a nice control, and confirms my bias, parabolic uptick in 2022
Slop from 24 onward definitely poisons anything onward