The debt as a security threat
The national debt is treated in these episodes as the central fiscal fact of American politics and, in more than one discussion, as a threat to national security. Bob Zadek introduced a January 2017 episode by describing spending in Washington that creates budget deficits which cannot be repaid, and said his guest, Ivan Eland, considered this the greatest non-military threat to national security The Return of Big Spending Republicans? (2017). Eland, identified by Zadek as Senior Fellow and Director of the Center of Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute, framed the distinction between the deficit and the debt directly: each year’s budget deficit is a flow, and the stock is the debt, which accumulates each time a deficit is run. He put the national debt at almost $20 trillion at that time.
Eland’s argument tied the debt to military capacity through the tax base. National security, he said, requires money to buy tanks, missiles, Navy ships and Air Force aircraft, and the taxes that pay for them depend on the economy. He cited Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said he thought the national debt was the biggest threat to national security — a statement Eland noted made headlines because the military is usually assumed to want more money. Eland also said the current Defense Secretary had talked about the same thing, while adding that such officials want to cut everything else rather than the defense budget. He argued that slow growth since the 2008-2009 recession was caused by the huge debt dragging the economy, and that if U.S. growth slowed by a couple of percent while China’s rose, the United States could become a second-tier power.
Figures and the deficit-versus-debt distinction
The episodes supply a series of figures, and the 2019 conversation between Charlie Deist and David Henderson turns on the difference between the annual deficit and the accumulated debt. Deist said the budget deficit grew under Reagan and reached a trillion dollars for the first time, then said it grew to three trillion by the end of Reagan’s term; Henderson corrected him flatly — it never hit a trillion under Reagan, and Deist acknowledged he had been talking about debt David Henderson on Trumponomics, Deficits, and Immigration (2019). Deist then restated the relationship, calling the deficit the annual accumulation, and said the national debt currently stood at 20 trillion. Asked where the deficit stood, Henderson said around 800 billion.
Henderson’s concern was that deficits were high and growing. He observed that the U.S. government had kept revenues at around 17 to 18 percent of GDP for roughly 65 to 70 years, a near-constant, and that when revenues approach 20 percent — as at the end of the Carter administration and again near the end of the Clinton administration — the result has been a tax cut. He argued the only way that constant would be undercut is a value-added tax, and that the politics of such a tax would change dramatically, moving the country toward European levels of taxation. He pointed to Western European countries in the mid-1960s, when a value-added tax was imposed as part of European Union agreements: some countries adopted it for revenue neutrality, some to reduce revenues as a percentage of GDP, and some to increase them. Those that sought to increase revenues succeeded, those that sought to hold revenues constant failed, and the one that sought to reduce revenues as a percentage of GDP also failed. On a chart of government revenues as a percentage of GDP, he said, Western Europe starts slightly above the United States and diverges sharply after the mid-1960s.
The 2020 figures and the politics of reform
By January 2020 the figure had moved again. Jonathan Bydlak, described by Zadek as the director, founder and head of the Institute for Spending Reform, said the national debt was then over 26 trillion dollars Rethinking Afghanistan with Jonathan Bydlak (2020). Zadek opened that episode by calling the country’s spending a binge never before seen on the planet, spending so much money and getting so little to show for it, and asked whether the chickens would come home to roost or whether things would simply get incrementally worse for the average American without any payback. He described the war in Afghanistan as the longest war in the history of the United States and the 8,000-pound gorilla within defense spending, and noted that calling it a war is a misnomer because war requires a declaration by Congress and a president signing a bill acknowledging it.
Bydlak’s account of the politics of spending reform is the most detailed in the sources. He said polling data he had recently seen showed that reducing spending polled highest among Republican voters, that there was a lot of concern on the Republican side about increases in the national debt and growth in government, and that this was consistently the issue with the highest level of support — though it did not necessarily evoke the most passion compared with other hot-button issues. He said the challenge of talking about dollars and cents is that members of Congress look for issues that get them attention. He also said most members want to do the right thing and are in it for good reasons, but that government does so much that no member can be an expert in everything, so members rely on shortcuts such as what party leadership tells them or what is politically expedient. He noted that some members come from an agricultural background and understand those issues instinctively, and some served in the military and understand nuances in Afghanistan, but that it is impossible for one person to be expert in all of it.
Entitlements, borrowing and collapse
An earlier episode supplies the starkest formulation of the debt’s scale. In October 2010, a guest whose name is not given in the excerpt said that 43 cents out of every dollar being spent was borrowed, that the country was bankrupt, and that without righting the financial ship the result would be nothing A Better America (2010). The same speaker said that without significant reform of Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and defense spending, and without radically reducing spending, the country would not be viable in the future and the currency would not be worth anything. He described this as the history of developed countries throughout civilization: they implode because they spend more money than they have, and governments collapse. Zadek’s response in the excerpt turns to foreign policy and troops in Europe and Asia, and the passage ends with him signing off as host.
Across episodes
The topic recurs across the run, and the treatment shifts with the figures rather than with the argument. In 2010 the debt appears as an imminent solvency crisis measured in borrowed cents on the dollar; in 2017 Ivan Eland frames it as the greatest non-military threat to national security and puts it at almost $20 trillion; in 2019 David Henderson and Charlie Deist work through the deficit-versus-debt distinction at the 20 trillion mark; in 2020 Jonathan Bydlak gives the figure as over 26 trillion and describes the political obstacles to reform. The 2009 episode on Cash for Clunkers lists the national debt among the unintended consequences of the program in its own summary but the excerpt breaks off before the guest speaks. What changes between episodes is the number and the emphasis — security in 2017, definitional precision in 2019, legislative politics in 2020 — while the underlying claim that spending is unsustainable is advanced by each guest in turn.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not explain what a strategic default by the United States would consist of, though the 2019 episode advertises it as a coming segment and the guest’s name appears immediately before the excerpt ends. They do not give the composition of the debt by holder, the interest cost of servicing it, or any statutory debt limit. The 2010 speaker’s proposed reforms are named but not specified, and no excerpt states what a value-added tax would raise or what rates would apply. The 2009 Cash for Clunkers episode mentions the national debt only in its framing summary, and the guest’s remarks on it are not present in the excerpt.