Matt O’Brien directs us to a Heritage Foundation economist presenting what is portrayed as a startling idea: America could become Greece! And it’s true — there probably haven’t been more than a few thousand articles issuing the same warning in the five (5) years since Alan Greenspan published “US Debt and the Greek Analogy“, with this immortal complaint:

Despite the surge in federal debt to the public during the past 18 months—to $8.6 trillion from $5.5 trillion—inflation and long-term interest rates, the typical symptoms of fiscal excess, have remained remarkably subdued. This is regrettable, because it is fostering a sense of complacency that can have dire consequences.

But Matt misses the truly wonderful part about the latest from Heritage, which is why we should be worried about turning into Greece:

Diverse academic research shows that economic growth slows significantly at high levels of public debt. Carmen M. Reinhart, Vincent R. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, as well as Manmohan S. Kumar, Jaejoon Woo, Stephen Cecchetti, Madhusudan Mohanty and Fabrizio Zampolli, report that advanced economies with high levels of debt (85-90 percent of GDP and higher) grow more slowly annually than their lower-debt counterparts.

You might think that debt worriers would try to put the whole 90-percent debacle behind them — not just the Excel error and the extreme sensitivity of the results to odd data choices, but the strong suggestion that whatever debt-growth correlation is left mainly reflects causation from growth to debt and not the other way around. But I heard the same thing at Freedomfest: either these people never heard about the R-R crash-and-burn, or they hope their readers haven’t.

More broadly, I’ve noted in other contexts that the right never gives up an argument. You see this on Obamacare: the usual suspects are still claiming that the ACA didn’t really reduce the number of uninsured, that there has been a massive rate shock, that it’s creating a giant hole in the budget, etc., even in the face of sharply dropping uninsurance, moderate rate hikes, and below-prediction costs. They add new arguments, but the old ones never go away no matter how ludicrously wrong they’ve proved.