Weekly Update: 08/08/2021

Councilmembers routinely get anonymous emails advocating for some issue–often using hyperbolic language. I got one this week saying “Vaccine Mandates Are Slavery!”

To which I reply: No, dude. Slavery is slavery.

But OK, being told you have no choice to get a vaccine is, to some degree, a loss of freedom. I’m not trying to minimize people’s feelings on this.

Now: wanna know what else is not freedom? Crushing debt. Just ask anyone on the 2016 City Council. Owe enough money and you no longer get to choose anything. Debt can take away everything, including your City.

So I want to throw something out there about debt and the Pandemic and Stimulus. Aside from the deaths and illness, the damage COVID-19 has done in terms of lives, jobs, businesses, homes is historic. And that damage will not stop until everyone is vaccinated. And the kicker? Almost 100% of the suffering now is completely unnecessary. Every month people do not get vaccinated adds billions of dollars of long term debt and keeps millions of citizens in a state of constant anxiety. That is not freedom.

No matter how fast we ‘recover’, that debt has no reasonable expectation of being addressed in our lifetimes. We are simply moving those trillions of dollars of debt (and anxiety) onto future generations.

So any stimulus money the City Of Des Moines receives should not be thought of as Christmas In July… which I meant sarcastically. Rather, this $9M should be thought of more like a ginormous pay day loan that our grandchildren will be stuck with.

The last twenty years of federal debt

In 2000, the federal debt was $5.6 trillion. It is now over $26 trillion. And after this year’s ‘stimuli’ it will surely blow past $30 trillion.

Cumulative Federal Debt 2000 – 2020

Date	Dollar Amount
09/30/2020	26,945,391,194,615.15
09/30/2019	22,719,401,753,433.78
09/30/2018	21,516,058,183,180.23
09/30/2017	20,244,900,016,053.51
09/30/2016	19,573,444,713,936.79
09/30/2015	18,150,617,666,484.33
09/30/2014	17,824,071,380,733.82
09/30/2013	16,738,183,526,697.32
09/30/2012	16,066,241,407,385.89
09/30/2011	14,790,340,328,557.15
09/30/2010	13,561,623,030,891.79
09/30/2009	11,909,829,003,511.75
09/30/2008	10,024,724,896,912.49
09/30/2007	9,007,653,372,262.48
09/30/2006	8,506,973,899,215.23
09/30/2005	7,932,709,661,723.50
09/30/2004	7,379,052,696,330.32
09/30/2003	6,783,231,062,743.62
09/30/2002	6,228,235,965,597.16
09/30/2001	5,807,463,412,200.06
09/30/2000	5,674,178,209,886.86

Many economists don’t worry about short term deficits. But no one can ignore such a vast amount of structural debt indefinitely.  Sooner or later the rent comes due. Just as it did for the City Of Des Moines five years ago.

Our grandchildren…

Future generations will rightly ask why we allowed the pandemic to drag on needlessly. They will wonder how the hell we could increase the national debt 600% in 20 years—and what we really got in return for all that spending. And my guess is that their resentment will be profound.

I know all that may seem high falutin’. People are suffering now. They want relief now. But I ran for office with the slogan, “I’ve lived here 25 years. And I want to make Des Moines even better for the next 25 years.” So the long term is also on my mind as I think about how we should spend our $9M share of stimulus money. The staggering amount of debt we are foisting on future generations obligates us to consider doing something really important with that check–for the future of Des Moines.