The New York Times has a frontpage story this morning on how the rising federal debt will soon begin to crowd out other federal spending. In the not too distant future, Interest payments on the debt could pass military spending.

The Times is right, although it ascribes the impending crisis to both the Trump tax cuts and the rise in interest rates, which the Fed has slowly increased to normal levels after years of near-zero rates following the onset of the recession in 2008.

But federal receipts are up in 2018 by $24 billion, not down, arguably because of the tax cuts. A booming economy automatically increases tax receipts as companies have higher profits, employees have bigger incomes, and Wall Street has greater capital gains.

The problem lies not with the tax cuts but, as always, with spending. We spent in deficit during the recession, as we always have. The deficit in 2009 was $1.412 trillion, higher than the entire national debt as recently as 1983.  But in times of prosperity, the government should spend in surplus, or at least hold spending steady.

In 1946, the debt was $269 billion, equal to almost 130 percent of GDP. But in the next 14 years, we added only $17 billion to the debt and the booming American economy of those years reduced the debt/GDP ratio to 58 percent. By 1970, it had fallen to 39 percent of GDP. The roaring inflation of the 1970s reduced the percentage to 34 percent, despite a tripling of the debt in dollar terms. In the 1980s, inflation waned but spending did not and the debt-to-GDP ratio climbed sharply.

After the Republicans swept the election of 1994, Congress kept spending in check. Outlays between 1994 and 2000 rose by 22 percent, while receipts rose by fully 61 percent. Again, the debt-to-GDP ratio fell from 69 percent to 57 percent.

If the federal government was able to restrain spending to match receipts in the postwar years in the 1990s, it can obviously do so now. At some point, even the United States can max out its credit card.

But since Congress seized control of the budget process in 1974 with the wildly misnamed Budget Control Act, fiscal discipline has been in short supply. A Congress elected on a fiscal discipline platform can do it, as it did in the 1990s. But unless the government starts keeping honest books and the president is given the power to control total spending, we are going to stumble into disaster sooner rather than later.