Racket of the Week: The $2 Billion Deli

How does a small sandwich shop near Philly that did $13,976 in sales last year come to have a two billion dollar valuation?

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For decades, any debate about spending was a zero-sum affair, with stimulus advocates butting heads with deficit hawks warning of inflationary disaster. But after Joe Biden’s “transformational” relief package this year, the hawks have retreated, seemingly for good. It feels very Alan Greenspan, very New-Paradigm to say so, but maybe it’s true, as NPR noted this year, that “Government borrowing doesn’t mean what it used to.”

Paul Krugman even wrote a piece called “Who’s afraid of the big, bad boom?” that sounded like an economist’s version of “How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb” — except his guilty pleasure was a rapidly expanding economy. While society drowns in other cultish fears, of maskless faces, naughty words, misinformation, Russians, “trauma,” and a hundred other bugbears, debt seems the one area where conventional wisdom hasn’t given in to safetyism. Traditional vices like sex, drugs, and even dirty jokes …