First, let’s acknowledge the obvious: just about everyone thinks the government needs to be spending right now. An economy frozen in place is a massive challenge that requires correspondingly massive mitigation measures. During the 2008 economic crisis, the Bush administration swallowed its free-market beliefs and bailed out the big banks, lest the entire financial sector be annihilated. Likewise does the Trump administration now authorize stimulus to households and small businesses. It’s a matter of survival, not ideology or economics.

Still, milestones matter, and we have just hit a grim one. From the Washington Examiner:

On Wednesday, the national debt soared above $25 trillion as Congress continues to approve massive spending projects to alleviate consequences resulting from the coronavirus pandemic.

Less than one month ago, the debt topped over $24 trillion, and on Nov. 1, 2019, that number reached $23 trillion. Over the course of President Trump’s tenure, the national debt has increased more than $5 trillion.

In response has arisen a unified cry: now is not the time to worry about the national debt! And that’s largely true. The problem is that it’s never the time to worry about the national debt. The first three years of Donald Trump’s administration saw an economic boom, yet Congress spent them cutting taxes and bloating the military. Right-wingers refused to countenance even a single dollar plucked from the Pentagon. Left-wingers screamed about “austerity” every time a federal employee used a coupon. Everyone seemed eager to move on from the dreary budget battles of the early 2010s, which had pitted Tea Partiers against President Obama to very little effect.

Those same voices are now assuring us that we can grow our way out of the current debt morass. We did it after World War II, they say, so why shouldn’t we do after the coronavirus? But there’s no guarantee we’ll see the same kind of economic recovery and baby boom that we did then; indeed, many projections point to a prolonged recession, which will dictate even more spending and less revenue. More to the point, we didn’t just pump up GDP following the Second World War. Under Dwight Eisenhower, we slashed the budget, with most of the blade falling on the military-industrial complex. That kind of fiscal rectitude is unimaginable today.

The good news is that we are likely a long way off from any kind of reckoning. Inflation is scant and the 10-year Treasury yield is at an all-time low. The bad news is that, as was supposed to be the Great Recession’s greatest lesson, if it seems too good to be true, then it is. We cannot get away with magical consequence-free borrowing forever. As Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, put it to CNN, “The breaking point is like an invisible dog fence. You don’t know where it is, but if you actually hit it, it’ll be a huge problem.”

When that day comes, all those eloquent and deeply considered expostulations of “But Krugman!!!!” will ring hollow. (Incidentally, even Paul Krugman was fretting about budget deficits at the start of the Trump administration.) The root of the problem, as is so often the case, is cultural. In Washington, leadership has been supplanted by electoral advantage, prudence by decadence, real debate by mindless tag lines. Given all this, why should we believe the government will ever bring its books to order?