It goes almost without saying that the deficit vultures are hypocrites. After all, Trump and McConnell rammed through a $2 trillion tax cut in 2017, with no apparent concern about the effects on the deficit. Nor have I heard any Republican complaints about Trump’s huge bailouts for farmers, whose distress is largely the result of his own policies.

An aside: Far too much reporting on these issues involves what the economist Dean Baker calls mind-reading. That is, news analyses include statements along the lines of “Republicans are concerned about rising deficits,” when in fact all we know is that Republicans claim to be concerned about rising deficits — and there are very good reasons to be skeptical about that claim. After all, have modern Republicans ever seen deficits as a constraint on their own tax-cutting agenda? Even once?

Still, hypocrisy aside, should we be worried about the effects of Covid-19 on debt? No.

It’s true that we’re headed for some eye-popping numbers. Last week the Congressional Budget Office released preliminary economic and budget projections for the next two years, which were both shocking and unsurprising.

That is, the numbers were grim but more or less in line with what many independent economists have been predicting. In particular, the budget office expects the Covid-19 crisis to drive the unemployment rate to 16 percent in a few months, which might even be on the low side.

Soaring unemployment will cause federal revenues to plunge, and also lead to a surge in spending on safety-net programs like unemployment insurance, Medicaid and food stamps. Add in the large relief packages Congress has passed, and the budget office projects a deficit that will temporarily rise to levels we haven’t seen since World War II, and it expects federal debt to rise to 108 percent from 79 percent of G.D.P., which sounds scary.

But the government will be able to borrow that money at incredibly low interest rates. In fact, real interest rates — rates on government bonds protected against inflation — are negative. So the burden of the additional debt as measured by the rise in federal interest payments will be negligible. And no, we don’t have to worry about paying off the debt; we never will, and that’s OK.

The bottom line is that right now, the only thing we have to fear from deficits is deficit fear itself. Pay no attention to the peacocks and vultures: In this time of pandemic, we can and should spend whatever it takes to limit the damage.

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