Get rid of debt, fast

This post was originally written as a series of tweets.

In the middle of the 18th Century, France had some real big problems with its national debt. But one publisher was sure he had the solution: a little bit of self-sacrifice.

As recounted in Rebecca L. Spang’s delightful history, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture, in 1778 the Gazetin de comestible — “a sort of mail-order catalogue of fine foods” — published its proposal, a medieval solution to a modern problem: “If each of its readers would simply fast one day a month and donate the money saved on that day’s food to the state, the national debt would be quickly under control.”¹

Needless to say, the Gazetin’s solution was not adopted. France’s national debt continued to balloon until, unable to resolve it by any other way, King Louis XVI called a meeting of the Estates General, setting off one of the most momentous chains of events in world history.

But I am not here to write about French history. Not today, anyway. The United States of America, like ancien régime France, has a very large national debt and persistent deficits. Could the Gazetin Solution work today? You bet I did the math.

The French national debt under Louis was indeed prodigious: around 5 billion livres in short- and long-term debt, per James MacDonald’s A Free Nation Deep In Debt: The Financial Roots of Democracy. That’s against government revenues of 400 million livres.² To put that in context, the ancien régime’s debt was 12.5 times its annual revenues (which were falling); the U.S. government’s debt of $21.48 billion is just over 5 times its roughly $4 trillion in federal expenditures.³ (I don’t have GDP figures available for pre-revolutionary France on hand to make that comparison.)

So our debt problem is much more manageable than Louis’s. (We pay substantially lower interest rates, too — Jacques Necker in the 1780s was floating French bonds at interest rates near 9 percent, per Macdonald, while the U.S. is floating bonds around 2.6 percent.⁴) But would a little patriotic fasting be able to put a dent in it?

The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that in 2016, the average U.S. household spent $7,203 per year on food both in and out of the home.⁵ That comes out to $19.73 per day.

In 2016 there were about 125.85 million U.S. households.⁶ Each one saving $19.73 would be $2.48 billion per month, or $29.8 billion per year.

The FY2016 U.S. deficit — not debt — was $585 billion.⁷ Everyone going hungry once a month would reduce this by $29.8 billion or around 5 percent. So not only would all those skipped Big Macs and Lean Cuisines and bagels and steak dinners not solve America’s national debt, they wouldn’t even go one-twentieth of the way to reducing it at all.⁸

As it turns out, after the Revolution broke out, the French government did in fact try to solicit donations — both voluntary and semi-coerced — from its citizens. But the result was as disappointing as it would be if the U.S. tried the Gazetin Solution to its beefy debt: around 9 million livres from a forced loan expected to raise 200 million, plus freewill offerings of about 1 million livres in money and 5 million “in goods, jewels and depreciated government paper.”⁹ Those years did see a flowering of fine Parisian restaurants, however. You can learn about that in Spang’s book.