Paul Krugman on where we stand From his newsletter today (subscription only) The U.S. federal government last ran a budget surplus in the fiscal year 2001. (Fiscal years begin in October of the previous calendar year. Don’t ask.) Since then, the government has borrowed roughly $20 trillion. That’s a large number, even for an economy as big as America’s: Federal debt held by the public has roughly tripled as a percentage of gross domestic product, from 32 percent to 94 percent. I argued in my last column that, despite all this borrowing, we are not in any kind of debt crisis. Historically, in fact, U.S. debt isn’t all that unusual. For example, over the past three centuries Britain emerged from each major war with debt as a percentage of G.D.P. well above the current U.S. level, and took many decades to bring that debt ratio back down:Britain has borrowed a lot over the years. Still, the political history of America’s 21st-century deficits isn’t edifying. George W. Bush squandered that 2001 surplus he inherited largely on tax cuts that favored the wealthy and the invasion of Iraq, both sold to the public on false pretenses. Donald Trump rammed through another big tax cut tilted toward the wealthy, again with false claims that it would do wonders for the economy. Democrats haven’t done anything comparably egregious — sorry, I’m not going to “both sides” this — but Joe Biden’s two-trillion-dollar American Rescue Plan looks excessive in retrospect, and helped feed a burst…