Talking to myself again
as November 5th approaches
I feel like I need to say something about the election, which is stupid, because everyone drawing breath has an opinion or prediction that they believe absolutely needs to be shared. Like the old saw goes, “Opinions are like assholes”; and in a nation of (roughly) some 165 million voters...well, you get the picture. My opinion is not going to tip the scale.
On the other hand, data is data, and an informed opinion beats a blind toss based on feelings. So, for what it’s worth, this is how the landscape looks from my desk chair.
The establishment is arranged in opposition to Trump. This was to be expected because every political job in the federal government depends upon baseline budgeting and unfettered spending increases. Somehow the American left became allied with bureaucracy and the inside-the-beltway crowd, and morphed into the party of big, intrusive government. I have no idea when it happened, exactly, but we’ve come some distance to get from love beads and Huarache sandals to a $6.2 trillion federal budget. I don’t know who is responsible. Both parties seem to spend like lottery winners smoking meth when in power. Both parties seem incapable of asking the question, when the next Great Plan is proposed: “Okay, it’s nice idea. But should we do it? Can we afford it?”
Because, face it. Everyone in Washington has a Great Plan. People with great plans in Washington are as common as people with A Winning Screenplay in Hollywood. Every party is jam packed with them.
There are great plans to end prejudice of all kinds, and inequality of all stripes, poverty, addiction, illiteracy, accidents, crime, disasters, climate change, and bad feelings between other nations. Plans to provide for everyone who can make it to the country. There are plans to correct history and undo mistakes made hundreds of years ago. Plans to cure disease and visit the stars. Plans to provide everyone with the internet and a computer. Plans to put everyone in their own home. Plans for bees and plans for tail lights. Plans upon plans upon plans. All have good intentions and intentions, today, are all that matter.
Very quickly, the cost of these plans adds up. No one likes to talk about this, because good intentions are not a justification in and of themselves, and saying that, today, is heresy.
The reality isn’t difficult to understand. Today the federal government spends about $6.2 trillion dollars a year, but takes in as revenue, about $4.5 trillion. That’s about $1.7 trillion short of paying the bills. The entire federal budget in 2001, under Bill Clinton, was $1.7 trillion. Personally, I find this doubling and trebling of the budget untenable. I admittedly know very little about economic policy, the charts and tables that go into drawing up a federal-size budget. I do know three things, though. I know that $1.7 trillion is a whole of simoleons. I know that something that can not go on forever, won’t. And I know that many, many people involved in our government are personally invested in pretending that this sort of spending can go on forever.
I have made a point of avoiding the political rhetoric as it unfolds. I know that Donald is not Just Like Hitler and I know that Kamala is not a Secret Communist Mole. I know that neither of them answers to Russia and, truth be told, both probably have the best intentions. What I have paid attention to, though, is the people they have gathered around them.
In Harris’s case, we need not look far, because the people who would serve in her administration will be the people serving now, or individuals very much like them. Let’s be frank about this. The Biden/Harris administration runs on autopilot. The departments do what they do without much oversight. It was decided by the Democratic Party that Joe Biden is too unwell to run and win, but he remains POTUS while his VP campaigns. The government did not grind to a halt. It chugs merrily away, spending and spending and spending. Harris represents the status quo. It is quaint to claim that she represents the bulwark defending democracy against all comers, but that assumes a functioning democracy requires more federal agencies than anyone can know. This is not hyperbole. The Administrative Conference of the United States--which lists 115 agencies in the appendix of their 2017 Sourcebook of United States Executive Agencies--had the following to say:
There is no authoritative list of government agencies. For example, FOIA.gov [maintained by the Department of Justice] lists 78 independent executive agencies and 174 components of the executive departments as units that comply with the Freedom of Information Act requirements imposed on every federal agency. This appears to be on the conservative end of the range of possible agency definitions. The United States Government Manual lists 96 independent executive units and 220 components of the executive departments. An even more inclusive listing comes from USA.gov, which lists 137 independent executive agencies and 268 units in the Cabinet.
This is mission creep and it is a natural process that does not require monsters, only fallible humans.
Trump has surrounded himself with a different type. Elon Musk. J.D. Vance. Vivek Ramswamy. RFK Jr.. Love them or hate them, agree or disagree, but these seem like serious people to me, the type to consider the bottom line when discussing the next great plan.
The possibility for change that they represent scares the snot out of anyone who’s annual budget depends upon government spending that is never examined very closely. These are people who can do math, really well, and are familiar with budgets that need to be balanced.
The rest of the rhetoric is all smoke. The abortion issue, the transgender debate, the kids in cages, who worked at McDonald’s, who Putin likes, who is a racist. It’s all bull, designed and packaged to keep your eye off of the ball. None of this matters, because, in the end, people get what they want. Prohibition went kaput. Weed was legalized in most places. In 2003 the Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v Texas that
The right to liberty under the Due Process Clause gives [the defendants] the full right to engage in their [sexual] conduct without intervention of the government… The Texas statute furthers no legitimate state interest which can justify its intrusion into the personal and private life of the individual.
So though moralists and despots might try to tell us what to do (they have in the past), the social issues do not really matter much. They come and go as the people demand and never last. History moves as the populace decides, not the “experts”, because this is how the United States was conceived and founded. One person might want men who want to be women playing women’s sports, so no one feels left out, and another might think that batshit crazy, but time and public opinion will sort that out, just as we did slavery, prohibition, marijuana, homosexuality, rock and roll, voting rights, etc., etc., etc..
Those debates can not even happen, though, if the lights don’t stay on. The bills have to get paid. Ask Cuba.
The individuals running the federal government today do not want to see any spending reduced, ever. They want to spend more, always, more. It is the nature of any bureaucracy to serve bureaucracy and expand, and currently bureaucracies run the nation. It just won’t work. The center will not hold. To me, this seems axiomatic and clear as day. Bureaucracies are inefficient and terrible at self-regulating. They are pretty much unaccountable. We should know (for example) how much of the foreign aid we give away each year finds its way to private bank accounts in Switzerland or the Cayman Islands. We don’t. Some government agency might, but we won’t be told, because to a bureaucracy, the citizens are not the ultimate employer. To a bureaucracy, the citizens are a resource.
So, to me, this is the central question: Do we work for the government, or does the government work for us?
Everyone will not agree. At sixty-six I can’t get too worked up about it because it will be our grandchildren who sift the rubble, but as has been said, something that can not go on forever, won’t. On the current course, it will all fall down one day. How disastrous that collapse eventually is depends, I think, on how much unrestrained and unaccountable growth we allow. A vote for the status quo is a vote for more growth, more unrealistic spending, and less accountability. It is silly to expect anything else. Can the course be corrected? I don’t know. I think we should try.
Anyway, on November 5th vote as you believe. What’s the worst that can happen?
More of the same.
Peace.