Hamilton's Blessing: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Our National Debt

Most of us only know Alexander Hamilton as the man whose face graces our ten dollar bills. Or, perhaps we know him as the unfortunate answer to the Jeopardy question: “Who was on the wrong end of a duel with Aaron Burr?” That is too bad because, as this fascinating book makes clear, he really should be most famous for being the architect of the United States’ first set of economic policies in his role as the country’s Secretary of the Treasury. In particular, it was Hamilton who crafted a system of issuing debt at a federal level to replace the less efficient method of relying on the states to serve that role.

Hamilton’s Blessing is not really the story of any one man though; rather, it is the history of how America’s show more national debt developed and has changed over the past two centuries. If that sounds like a dull, painful reading experience, rest assured that it is not. In the hands of a talented historian like Gordon, this is a lively tale replete with myriad accounts of visionary economic insights as well as catastrophic political blunders. A key focus of the narrative is how the collective attitude in the United States regarding the act of borrowing money to pay our bills, which has been both the blessing that Hamilton promised and the curse that many others predicted, has evolved over time.

Today, things like income and inheritance taxes, the existence of a central bank, and a federal government that borrows more than it can ever hope (or intend) to repay are taken as given. However, these are relatively recent developments; a tax on personal income in the United States was introduced to help pay for the Civil War and only became a permanent fixture shortly before World War I. Also, for the country’s first 150 years, lawmakers followed Adam Smith’s prescription of paying back in good times what we needed to borrow strategically in the bad (e.g., wars, economic depressions). Starting in the 1940s, however, that attitude changed dramatically as John Maynard Keynes’ theory of managing the economy with active deficits began to take hold. That path, justified by the belief that the old pay-as-you-go mentality is irrelevant because “we are just borrowing from ourselves,” is the one we are still on today.

It has been said that there is no such thing as a pure economy—only political economies exist. The author emphasizes this point by noting that, removed from the discipline of having to balance the national budget, the last several generations of politicians have lacked the resolve to fix our convoluted tax system or cut federal spending at appropriate times. As a consequence, the national debt has now reached levels that would be incomprehensible to someone living just 50 years ago. While it is occasionally number-heavy and a little dated, this book provides the reader with both a superb historical context and sobering vision of our economic future. show less

Hamilton, Alexander (Subject)