On May 29, London’s Financial Times reported some startling news about the U.S. national debt. Instead of being about $3.5 trillion, as commonly understood, it was actually $44 trillion, according to a suppressed Treasury Department report by economists Kent Smetters and Jagadeesh Gokhale. This was an odd story to put on page one, since it mostly just repeated information that had been in the public record for a while. Smetters revealed the $44 trillion number during congressional testimony on March 6. On May 9, the supposedly suppressed report was the object of a conference at the American Enterprise Institute and...