Recommended: US Debt from the Founder's Perspective

George Friedman of STRAFOR has, yet again, produced an insightful article: US Debt from the Founder's Perspective. He argues that the founders of our nation, always concerned about the growth of the sort of government tyranny that ruled Europe in their time, deliberately constructed a nation in which government moved slowly, with authority divided among many competing groups , the central government, the courts, and state and local authorities, so that they would act as checks on each other. From their perspective, the sort of gridlock currently in evidence in Congress is good - if there isn't consensus on what ought to be done, than better nothing should be done until some consensus can be reached.  In that respect the current impasse isn't a failure, but the passage of ObamacCare by brute force political hardball in the face of majority public opposition was a failure.

With respect to the US debt, he argues to the founders debt was not an economic issue but rather a moral one. It would be unthinkable to fail to pay back a debt one owes as a matter of moral obligation.  But it would be just as unthinkable to assume a debt without any plan or prospect of paying it back. They would no doubt be appalled at the debt we have accumulated, and the purposes to which we have put that borrowed money.

Recommended: First Thoughts - Can Boehner sell the emerging deal in the House?

The NBC News site has an interesting article today entitled First Thoughts: Can Boehner sell the emerging deal in the House? The article itself is intertesting, but especially interesting are the eight political factions they ideintify in the nation, from the "Bleeding Hearts" left through the "Talk Show Heads" right, and the accompanying quiz one can take to see where one's own political views fall on the spectrum (full disclosure, I rank as one of the "MBA middle", socially liberal and fiscally conservative).

The link to the quiz is at the end of the article, and also here.

Of particular intertest is the conclusion that the political middle in the nation as a whole is far larger than is popularly assumed, and far larger than the bitter polarization in Congress would lead one to expect.  But of course it doesn't really matter the composition of the electorate - what matter is the composition of the electorate that shows up on election day. Unfortunately, the ideological extremes tend to be more consistent in voting than the middle, so we seem to be getting more ideologically extreme representatives.  Hence the dysfunction in Congress.

The real problem

Lost in all the rhetoric about the current government shutdown and the impending need to raise the debt ceiling (yet again!) is the real underlying problem - the federal government spends more than it takes it, borrowing the difference, and this is simply unsustainable in the long run. Here is a chart from www.heritage.org, based on Congressional Budget Office figures,  that makes it very plain:

It's all very well for the administration to argue that it needs to raise the debt ceiling to preserve America's fiscal credit, but why, in almost six years in office, has it done so little to address the real issue - the growing deficit?  Only the sequester, to which the administration was dragged kicking and screaming,  has slowed the spending increases.

Recommended: The Roots of the Government Shutdown

George Friedman at STRATFOR has an interesting piece today: The Roots of the Government Shutdown.  He argues that the shutdown is the unintentional result of political reforms movements in the 1960s and 1970s, which took political power away from state-level political bosses who, while certainly susceptible to corruption, were not especially ideological, and delivered it to much more ideologically-driven groups who now see any compromise as betrayal of their principles.

Fareed Zakaria makes something like the same point in his book The Future of Freedom, in which he notes that legislators used to be able to make back-room deals (ie - compromises where each at least got half a loaf), but with the transparency forced by reformers in recent decades, all these negotiation now take place in public, and as soon as one side seems to be compromising they get a thousand phone calls and emails demanding that they not compromise, which pretty well mucks up the political process.

It does seem to me like another case of the road to hell being paved with good intentions - the inevitable unintended consequences of what seemed at the time like good ideas.

Still think NASA is "non-essential"?

Shared by my grandson:

Another government shutdown

Well, now we have it – another government shutdown. Pundits think the Republicans will be blamed by the voting public, and perhaps they will. But in fact Democrats are just as responsible as Republicans for the impasse we have reached.

Michael Barone has an article today in RealClearPolitics, If Only Obamacare Had Been Passed With Careful Deliberation, that compares ObamaCare with passage of the Civil Rights Act, another piece of legislation that was highly controversial, but as he points out, was passed by a bipartisan majority, unlike ObamaCare.

As he says:

Obamacare has been a different story. Universal health care was promised, not to address a high-profile headline crisis, but because President Obama's twenty-something speechwriter wanted an applause line for a campaign speech.

The poorly drafted bill was passed almost entirely on party lines by exceedingly narrow margins -- and in the face of majority negative public opinion.

So it's not surprising that opponents won't accept its legitimacy or permanence. History tells us what that takes. 

All political acts exact a price. The price that the Democrats are paying for the hubris of assuming  Obama’s election  gave them  a mandate to pass major controversial legislation without any bipartisan support at all is the dogged  Republican resistance they now face.  That has been a heavy price – it has stymied most of President Obama’s legislative initiatives.

The bitter partisan warfare in Congress these days isn’t all due to that single act of hubris and hardball politics, but it certainly did exacerbate it.  What liberals have to come to terms with is that the nation is almost evenly divided these days between conservatives and liberals, so neither side has a clear mandate to push ideological policies favored by their extreme ends. The Republicans learned that (maybe) the hard way in the last administration.  The Democrats are learning it the hard way (we hope) in this administration.

Recommended: US and Iranian Realities

George Friedman at STRATFOR has another insightful piece today: U.S. and Iranian Realities.  It is well worth reading.