What’s $4 trillion among friends?
Just a sop to distract Leviathan for a short while.
He’ll snaffle it down and then take a brief nap before waking up and demanding another snack.
This time, it was a $4 trillion nip and tuck to the federal debt.
For decades, the people that Americans have elected to govern have overspent for one overriding reason: to keep themselves in power.
“We’ll spend now in order to give the punters free stuff ('programs’) and worry about paying for it later.”
They figured that “later” would either never come or—what amounted to the same thing so far as they were concerned—wouldn’t come until they were out of office.
$10 trillion, $20 trillion, $30 trillion, but who’s counting?
The preening suits who waddle about the Capitol thinking up new things we may not or must do just love spending other people’s money.
As I write this, the federal debt is $31.4 trillion.
That, I submit, is an unimaginable number, by which I mean that most mortals can’t really comprehend what it means.
Spelling it out helps a little: 31,400,000,000,000.
But even that’s woefully inadequate because, moving from right to left, each additional zero encompasses an increasing saga of woe.
The last few zeros to the right don’t have much to say.
You can knock them off with a shrug.
And if you’re a big shot—someone, for example, who lives his life sucking up to voters and interest groups and then swanning up and down the corridors of power mouthing platitudes and vibrating with shivers of self-importance—you can manage to be cavalier with handfuls of zeros: 300,000,000 or even 3,000,000,000.
There are really two takeaways from this latest pas de deux between the forces of fiscal incontinence and the timid chamber pots that pretend to contain them.
The first is that this is really just the latest season of a long-running unfunny miniseries called “How the Public Gave Up on Democracy and Let a Bunch of Self-Important Low Lifes Wreck the Country.”
The second involves the genius of effective packaging.
We’re supposed to look at this horrible exercise in fiscal irresponsibility and say, “Thank you, O modern-day Solons, for leading us so wisely and protecting us from the ravages of Default! Thank you for spending all our money, our children’s money, and their children’s money! We know it was for the higher purpose of keeping you in office! Thank you!”
The last time that happened, when President Barack Obama was in charge, America had its credit rating cut to AA+ from AAA.
The world ended, the screen faded to black, and no one was ever heard from again.
Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is a Republican. So it’s incumbent on him to make some fiscally responsible noises before falling into line and doing whatever the Democrats want.
Consider this gem:
“We have reached agreement in principle,” McCarthy said, “a deal worthy of the American people to lift people out of poverty with no new taxes or government overreach programs.”
He actually said that: “a deal worthy of the American people.”
“No new taxes.”
No new “government overreach programs,” whatever that means.
But we all know what it means.
By the way, is it the job of the government to “lift people out of poverty”?
We’ve come to the point where even Republicans say such things.
Forget all that talk about “limited government.”
We live now in the era of “government unlimited.”
That used to be known as musical comedy.
Let me suggest that it represents an inversion of Karl Marx’s sly adaption of Georg Hegel’s dialectic.
Things repeat themselves, Hegel said.
Oh, yes, said Marx, but Hegel forgot to add, first as tragedy, then farce.
What we’re witnessing is the opposite.
It seemed almost funny at first, that farce.
Fodder for things such as “Li'l Abner.”
Then, we see the grimace behind the clown’s smile.
Turns out that behind the laughter, there was tragedy.
“The money that they taxes us/ That’s known as revenue/ They compound up collaterals/ Subtracts the residue/ Don’t worry about the principal/ And interest it incrues/ They’re shipping all that stuff to foreign lands/ The country’s in the very best of hands.”
Perhaps, as Aristotle observed in the “Nicomachean Ethics,” it’s a case of not being able to do the right thing because the choices we’ve made in the past have put the right course of action out of reach.
Some of the pols we continue to elect to govern us come close to admitting some such thing, although instead of invoking Aristotle, they say, “Our hands are tied,” “Previous obligations,” or “It’s the lesser of two evils.”
Who tied their hands? Who made those promises? Who steered the ship of state into these perilous waters?
Those are questions they don’t want asked.
And they won’t be asked.
The country’s in the very best of hands.
