You’d think that people would have learned their lesson after years of financial industry gimmickry, corporate tax avoidance and mistreatment of workers.

As our nation bumps up hard against a national debt north of $31 trillion, let’s start with the obvious: Our expenditures are greater than our revenue. And while this isn’t the crisis that Republicans imagine when a Democrat is in the White House, common sense suggests that bringing expenditures and revenue into closer alignment would be a good thing.

When classified documents turned up in President Joe Biden’s former office, his Delaware home and the garage housing his Corvette, the political impact was predictable. Republicans gleefully accused Biden of the same offense that prompted the FBI to raid former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate last August.

Whether President Joe Biden’s misguided plan to forgive some $400 billion in federal student-loan debt goes forward will ultimately be up to the Supreme Court. For now, there’s more the federal government should be doing to rein in the costs of higher education — and thus reduce how much students borrow in the first place.

International efforts aimed at reviving the Iranian nuclear deal were largely stalled in 2022, and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s remarks on Tuesday that the United States no longer considers reaching an agreement with Iran over its nuclear program a priority paint a gloomier picture for the prospects of the multilateral agreement.

Bipartisanship is the solution to some problems, but it also helped create them. On the one hand, if you are a classical liberal with a strong preference for fiscal responsibility, bipartisanship generally gets you nowhere. Big Capitol Hill deals mean big spending. On the other hand, the only path to reforming the drivers of our current and future debt or making other important changes is through a bipartisan agreement.

Old habits die hard, as the saying goes. But myths and legends do, too, as Hunter S. Thompson famously said.

Ideas that start on the progressive fringes have a way of becoming government policy these days, as President Biden’s $400 billion student loan cancellation shows. Lo, Democrats in Congress are now pressing the President to impose rent control nationwide.

Defense spending is vital to the ensure the nation’s security. But that doesn’t mean the Pentagon should be above budget scrutiny. Far from it, as a recent audit reveals.

Thanks to El Niño, the world is about to experience something like time travel to the year 2050. It won’t be pleasant. But rather than devolve into panic at the grim climate future it portends, we should use it as a warning about the need to do more to slow global warming.

All things being equal, burning gas isn’t the best way to cook. Not only are newfangled electric induction burners faster, but research suggests a correlation between the old blue flames and higher rates of asthma. Then there’s the global emissions problem. All of which is to suggest that, if money and labor and energy were unlimited, New York would be wise to wave a wand and switch to electric ovens (and electric heat-pumps to warm buildings, while we’re at it, but that’s another editorial).

Like the hockey-masked villain in some cheesy horror flick, the GOP’s debt ceiling caucus just keeps coming back. Once again, the party’s more radical members are threatening to hold America’s full faith and credit hostage by refusing to raise the nation’s debt limit. The Treasury hit that $31.4 trillion limit Thursday, meaning it will have to be raised — as it routinely has been over the years, under both parties, to cover expenses incurred by both parties.

As we approach the midpoint of President Joe Biden’s first term, there is little doubt that he deserves a solid “A.” He has turned the economy around, gotten the pandemic under control, gotten inflation under control and laid the basis for a rapid transition to clean energy. No president since Lyndon Johnson has as much to show for their first two years in office. Unlike Johnson, Biden managed to push through key legislation with a tiny majority in the House and the thinnest possible margin in the Senate.