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So it's my birthday today.

I'm 40 years old.

And birthdays like this, the ones divisible by 10, I guess,

really force a person to do some existential reflection.

Like, how have I changed since I was 30, 20?

And maybe partly because I'd share a birthday

with my first college roommate, shout out Matt.

I was thinking about my life recently

right after I graduated from college. As a 23-year-old writer at the Atlantic, it was my day job

to blog about economics, and in particular to blog about that famously delicious and click-bady

topic of fiscal policy. That is how the U.S. taxes and spends money. This was, believe it or not,

one of the biggest stories in the country, if you don't remember. At the time, there was a

huge debate about the U.S. debt, how much we should worry about it. Typically, the debate broke

down by ideology. It was conservatives and libertarians who told us to worry about the debt,

and it was liberals who criticized conservatives and libertarians for freaking out about nothing and

using debt fears as a smokescreen to cut spending on seniors and poor people. But 15 years later,

...