Long bond: Deeper in debt

St. Louis Post-Dispatch: The Treasury Department is thinking about issuing 30-year bonds again. We should welcome that with all the joy we would show at the return of air raid drills, fallout shelters or seven-year locusts. It's a sign that things are getting worse.
The Treasury stopped issuing 30-year bonds in 2001. That was the fourth year of record budget surpluses, which Uncle Sam was using rapidly to pay down the national debt.
Back then, the White House and Congress were predicting $5.6 trillion in surpluses over the coming decade. That would pay off the government's debt in time to make funding the boomer's retirement a breeze.
Why issue 30-year bonds if you can pay off your debts much sooner?
The return of the long bond would acknowledge that those happy thoughts are long gone and that we're headed deeper into the hole. The government will overspend its tax collections by about $448 billion this year alone. Rather than pay down the national debt, we may add another $5 trillion to it over the coming decade.
Bush's tax cuts
The surpluses were killed off in part by the mild 2001 recession. But the main culprits were the Bush administration's tax cuts combined with rapid increases in government spending, including the cost of our bloody blunder in Iraq. The tax-cut-and-spend crowd running Washington is spending us into serious trouble.
If we intend to pass on a gigantic debt to our children ... then 30-year bonds actually make sense. By spreading its obligations over longer periods, the government makes itself less vulnerable to swings in interest rates.