WASHINGTON, D.C. Mar. 31 (DPI) – Veteran columnist George Will offered that the current “geyser of federal spending” might be ill-timed as the economy emerges from the pandemic, but readers hit back with often-vicious comments about Mr. Will’s apparent lack of sympathy for the needy.

The 79-year-old Will made the point that if interest rates return to normal levels, the cost of carrying all of the accumulated federal debt would approach the size of entire federal budget.

The Federal Reserve promises to continue stimulative policy — near-zero interest rates — and its median growth estimate for 2021 is 6.5 percent, up from its 4.2 percent estimate just three months ago. Low rates mean that servicing the national debt this year is projected to cost only $378 billion, a sum equal to almost 25 percent of last year’s federal personal income tax revenue. Marc Joffe of the Reason Foundation says, “If interest rates return to the levels we saw during the 1980s, debt service costs would suddenly consume half the federal budget or more.”

He even tied in a reference to Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” – a somewhat off-beat analogy for our government’s claim of saving the economy while the economy’s already well on the mend.

Readers, though, were largely outraged at Will’s insensitivity. The most popular comments reflected a broad hostility:

“Democrats are promising to create the boom by showering freshly created money on a grateful nation”
And I thought it was to prevent people from losing health insurance, stop them from being evicted, and provide enough funds to help them feed their families. I guess Mr. Will has other priorities in mind.

We are at a point in our economy where “stimulus” not directed at working class Americans ends up in the net worth of America’s billionaires and in the cash reserves of global corporations. That influx of cash is not employed to get people digging up bottles of hidden money, or building roads and bridges (infrastructure), or producing things (manufacturing) – to stimulate economic activity. Instead, it goes to economic rent seeking through mergers/acquisitions, executive compensation, tax-avoidance offshore, and tax-advantaged dividends. Despite the Trump round of stimulus (too puny), America’s 660 or so billionaires saw their combined net worth grow by $1.1 trillion over the past year of pandemic, while tens of millions of Americans are still out of work.

So let’s give Biden and the Democrats credit for passing a true Keynesian stimulus, necessary with workers still struggling to find jobs, and with interest rates at the zero lower bound. That’s how things work in a fiat currency. Put people to work productively – not diggers and fillers, but building and making things we need (high speed passenger rail, the global energy transition, inexpensive high-speed rural broadband). If inflation heats up, the Fed has the tool to use, just as Paul Volcker used that tool 4 decades ago.

Or we can cut more taxes for the wealthy, redistributing more and more of the nation’s wealth upward.

Where was this concern when the GOP gave away trillions to the top 1%???

Somehow conservatives only seem to care when the recipients of government funds are regular people. It’s as though they relate more to corporate “people” than their fellow human beings.