Young column: Uses for $5 trillion other than a tax-cut ‘debt bomb’

My wife has a way of measuring excess that’s particular to her passion.

At any obscene outlay, she’ll wonder: “How many animal shelters would that build?”

Let’s say your government shells out $45 million for a military parade on the birthday of a war hero-denigrating, draft-eluding president.

A video I saw says it takes about $10,000 to get an animal shelter started. That parade will cost 4,500 startup shelters.

Speaking of big tickets: The Washington-based Committee for a Responsible Budget says the fiscal designs pushed by the Republican-controlled House will result in $5 trillion in new debt over the next 10 years.

Fascinating. All those millions kicked off Medicaid. All those billions of dollars carved out of Medicare. All those fired in the performance-art austerity of DOGE. And we end up $5 trillion deeper in the hole?

Hell, yeah. Debt be damned. Tax cuts above all.

It’s all about repeating a costly error: extending the soon-to-expire tax cuts signed by this president in 2017.

You remember your tax cut, don’t you? Don’t you? No, you don’t. If you are of average means, it might as well have not happened.

Remember the big, beautiful boost to the economy? Nope, not that, either.

And what did we get for it? Debt.

The Congressional Budget Office back then projected that the tax cuts would result in $10 trillion in debt over a decade.

Now, say budget experts, extending those tax cuts will cost even more through 2035.

“Oh, yeah?” you may say. “The Democrats are just as guilty of this.”

You would be wrong.

Democrats have been far more focused on reducing debt – Clinton, Obama, Biden – and more effective at it by acknowledging that cuts in spending alone won’t do the trick.

Joe Biden’s signature clean-energy initiative was mostly paid for through a combination of corporate tax increases, including a new minimum corporate tax, and a 1 percent excise tax on stock buybacks.

You may convulse at the word “taxes” in any form. But it’s only because you’ve been brainwashed to (1) believe that something can be had for nothing and (2) tax cuts pay for themselves.

No, Biden didn’t balance the budget. But even his most ambitious spending initiative, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, added a relatively modest $256 billion to the deficit over 10 years.

And it built stuff!

New York Times columnist Ezra Klein’s concern about what he deems the GOP “debt bomb” isn’t cost, necessarily. It’s this: What the hell does all this accomplish?

“Five trillion dollars is a lot of debt,” he writes, “but if it would lead us to invent commercialized nuclear fusion or perfect a drug that would double our healthy life span, then fine. It’s worth it.”

This budget policy builds nothing. It cures nothing. It innovates nothing.

It is gratuitous fiscal recklessness.

What would I do with that $5 trillion?

I’d follow Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s lead. I’d invest in people – specifically cash-strapped strivers who otherwise could better serve their nation than swim in student debt.

As of 2024, the outstanding student loan debt was over $1.7 trillion. The total exceeds what’s owed on auto loans and credit cards.

Relieving that debt would be the most dynamic economic jolt since the combo of World War II and the New Deal ended the Great Depression.

Wipe that out and free up dollars to buy homes and start families — and businesses.

Follow that with, as Warren proposes, a universal federal guarantee of free community college.

Do these things and billions of dollars would still be rattling around from that $5 trillion the Republicans want to blow to suit their prurient tax urges.

What to do with the leftover billions? Here’s one: Embark on the most aggressive initiative ever to build low-income housing and shelters for the homeless.

Then, and per my wife’s suggestion: Establish the national Department of Tender Loving Care for Animals Needing Homes.

Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.