The gag with mirrors comes from the Book of Daniel: Babylon’s king throws a wild party and, in the midst of his drunkenness, toasts the gods of gold, silver, and various other commodities. No sooner has he done so than the writing appears on the wall, spelling out with disembodied fingers “mene mene, tekel, upharsin.” They’re currency units: half-dollar, half-dollar, penny, and two bits. But what does it mean? None of the A-list seers Belshazzar keeps on the payroll has a clue what it portends, so the King calls in Daniel the Jew to explain things, which he does, very bluntly: Mene: “God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it.”
Tekel: “Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.”
Upharsin: “Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.”
Within twenty-four hours, Belshazzar is slain and Darius the Mede is king.
Today, the units are larger than in Babylon: “Mene mene, tekel, upharsin” is now trillion trillion, billion, half-trillion. But the upshot’s the same.
We’ve spent too much of tomorrow today—to the point where we’ve run out of tomorrow: fiscally, our days are numbered; structurally, we’ve been weighed in the balances and found wanting; and geopolitically, the Medes are thin on the ground but the Persians have gone nuclear.
So, if the deficits are “unsustainable,” then what happens when they can no longer be sustained? A failure of bond auctions? A downgraded government debt rating? Reduced GDP growth? Total societal collapse?
Mad Max on the New Jersey Turnpike?
Testifying to the House Budget Committee in 2010, CBO chief Douglas Elmendorf attempted to pull back from the wilder shores of “unsustainable”: “I think most observers expect that the government will act, that the unsustainability will be resolved through action, not through witnessing some collapse down the road,” he told the political grandees. “If literally nothing is done, then eventually something very, very bad happens. But I think the widespread view is that you and your colleagues will take action.”20
Dream on, you kinky fantasist. If that’s your
By the year 2075.
As that “solution” suggests, the real problem is that over the last three-quarters of a century the United States has adopted a form of government all but impervious to reality. Come alternate Novembers, the American people have a choice between a fellow running on fluffy abstract nouns—“hope,” “change,” “generic gaseous uplift”—and a fellow promising small government. That’s a best case scenario, by the way. Sometimes, as in 2008, you find yourself choosing between a candidate promising to guarantee the mortgages of people who “bought” houses they and their banks knew they couldn’t afford, and a candidate promising to give “tax cuts” to millions of people who pay no taxes. But, assuming you did get a genuine choice, what is the net result of these two starkly different platforms?
None. In America, federal spending (in inflation-adjusted 2007 dollars) went from $600 billion in 1965 to $3 trillion in 2008.22 Regardless.
The Heritage Foundation put it in a handy cut-out’n’weep graph: until the Democrats accelerated up to Obamacrous Speed in 2009, it’s a near perfect straight line across four decades, up, up, up.23 Doesn’t make any difference who controls Congress, who’s in the White House—Democrat, Republican, bit of both. The government just grows and grows, remorselessly. A president of one party and a Congress of the other? Up and up it goes. So much for those sophists who hymn the virtues of “gridlock.” Every two years, the voters walk out of their town halls and school gyms and tell the exit pollsters that three-quarters of them are “moderates” or “conservatives” (a clear center-right majority) and barely 20 percent are “liberals.”24
Sometimes, as in 1980, 1994, and 2010, they explicitly vote for small government. And then, on the Wednesday morning after the Tuesday night before, Big Government resumes its inexorable growth. Newt Gingrich and his dragon-slayers? According to a 2000 report by the Cato Institute, “the combined budgets of the 95 major programs that the Contract with America promised to eliminate have increased by 13 percent.”25
That’s what’s happened since the Sixties. What of the future? The CBO ran the longer-term numbers: The “alternative fiscal scenario,” which factors in likely changes in policy, calculates that public debt will rise from 44 percent of GDP in 2008 to 716 percent by 2080.26 Then again, the CBO’s “extended-baseline scenario,” which assumes there will be no changes to current policy, says public debt will only rise to 280 percent by 2080.
