Fiscal hawks like to drum up interest in the national debt by making the astronomical numbers more tangible. The United States owes $31.6 trillion to public creditors, more than $290,000 for each household. You could spend $1 million every day for almost 86,000 years before having to borrow more. But no one really cares. Talking about how many times all of the dollars laid end to end would go to the moon and back (6,000, as it happens) is just not going to get people to think differently about the national debt. What should matter is that the consequences of this debt are not off in the future, but already here. The government's deficits have saddled many American families with higher costs, largely from rising interest rates. The Budget Lab, the policy research center at Yale where I am the executive director, recently estimated that congressional-spending decisions since 2015 have raised Treasury yields by almost a full percentage point, which affects what American households pay...
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