Jonathan Bydlak at LegBranch.org:
[As] we come out of the economic and public health hellscape of the last year, the potential for a new crisis is beginning to rear its ugly head. The haunting fiscal picture that the coronavirus has left in its wake was summarized in the Congressional Budget Office’s latest Budget and Economic Outlook, and the picture is predictably bleak. Massive, rising debt dominates the fiscal landscape for years to come, and as my colleague recently pointed out, this doesn’t even include the additional $1.9 trillion that is likely to pass. Whether or not it’s fair, this is an issue that Biden will have no choice but to address. As a report by ProPublica and the Washington Post noted last month, “Donald Trump built a national debt so big (even before the pandemic) that it’ll weigh down the economy for years.” An underappreciated legacy of the Trump years is the massive run-up in the federal debt, and the pandemic certainly didn’t help. Thus far, however, few ideas have been presented to address this issue, and of those that exist, most have failed to attract the bipartisan support necessary to have a chance of moving forward.