Drunken Sailors - A History

Please, please, pretty please read this incredible piece by John Steele Gordon on The Sorry Tale of America's Out-of-Control Spending.

From the piece:

At the end of fiscal 2008, which came on September 30 of last year, the American national debt stood at $9.6 trillion. That sum is, perhaps, quite beyond the imagining of most people. It is, after all, 250 million times the average per capita income. Even the total fortunes of the entire Forbes 400 list add up to less than 15 percent of it. To use a journalistic measure that dates back to the late 18th century—when the British national debt had become a major political issue in that country—if you laid 9.6 trillion silver dollars end to end, they would reach to the sun and back, with enough left over to wrap around the Earth more than 1,700 times.

.......The bad news is that the debt is rapidly rising, both in absolute terms and relative to GDP, thanks to the current recession, the stimulus effort to end that recession, and the bailout of the country’s financial system. The budget deficit for fiscal 2009 is estimated to be a staggering $1.6 trillion, larger than the entire national debt as recently as 1984. It is the largest peacetime deficit (measured as a percentage of federal revenues) since 1936, when the country was still in the throes of a far worse economic downturn. The deficit will cause the ratio of debt to GDP to rise to over 80 percent by the end of fiscal 2009. That will be the highest it has been since 1950.

.....The U.S. debt exploded in the last half-century from a fateful intersection of 1) a national economic trauma; 2) a fundamental change in the prevailing economic theory; 3) ill-considered political fund raising reforms after Watergate; and 4) reforms in Congress that made spending impossible to control.

......Roosevelt, in office, quickly accepted the need for “passive deficits,” those resulting from the poor economy. Then in 1936 John Maynard Keynes published The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Keynes argued that while supply and demand must balance in the long run, in the long run, as he famously quipped, “we are all dead.” In the short run, Keynes thought aggregate supply can outstrip demand (producing depression) or vice versa (producing inflation).

Keynes argued for “active deficits”—deliberate spending in deficit to increase demand and bring the economy into balance in times of depression. Keynes also argued, of course, that when the economy overheated, the government should be in surplus to soak up excess demand.

Economists took to Keynesianism immediately. It is not hard to see why. First, it gave economists a powerful new analytical tool. Second, it greatly increased the power and influence of economists. Before Keynes, presidents had not needed economists any more than they had needed astronomers. But if government was now to be the engineer of the national economic locomotive, revving and braking through Keynesian means as needed, then government needed experts to guide it.

.....Campaign finance reform after the Watergate scandal brought the political action committee system into being, making, in effect, lobbyists major funders of political campaigns. Naturally the lobbyists were interested in federal spending, not federal fiscal restraint.

The budget and the debt exploded. Like an alcoholic trying to quit drinking, Washington tried to reform itself with a series of budget deals and “summits.” None of it worked, as Congress, like the alcoholic, kept making one-time exceptions to the rules.