Ellie Kemper began trending on Twitter because someone unearthed a picture of her being crowned Queen Of Love And Beauty in 1999 at a ball that has racist roots.
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I first became a Wall Street correspondent 34 years ago, after Black Monday, Oct. 19, 1987. An element in that day’s panic was an undertow of concern about ballooning public spending. A debt clock loomed over Times Square, alarming passersby, its flickering red line of figures looking like what it was, a danger signal. I recall people’s eyes standing on stalks at the “telephone number” string of digits showing what we collectively owed. Public debt back then had reached $3 trillion.
Today, it’s $28 trillion, seven times as much. Yet although our fiscal condition is measurably much worse than it was a generation ago, debt barely registers on most politicians’ radars. They spend like proverbially intoxicated mariners. The Democratic Party does everything it can to increase borrowing and spending, working under the spell of a delusional but fashionable idea called Modern Monetary Theory, which posits that we can spend as much as we want without adverse