The Years After Bush

It's a nice job in some ways, being President. $400,000 yearly salary, $12 million yearly budget for the White House residence, unlimited access to Camp David, a private 747, worldwide travel opportunities, access to virtually any celebrity, artist, or great thinker your heart might desire. Job security is such that only one President has been actually removed from office by impeachment (Andrew Johnson), and one other hightailed it before a posse could form (Richard Nixon). A few Presidents, of course, have been shot (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy) and one other wounded (Reagan), and one other shot at (Ford, twice). Others died of cholera (Zachary Taylor) stroke (Harding), pleurisy (Harrison) and cerebral bleeding (FDR). Add it all up and you've got 4 assassinations, four deaths by natural causes and 2 Presidents removed from office, which means that 10 Presidents out of 43 didn't make it to the end of their elected terms, a figure approaching 25% (23.25%; I'm doing my part to improve American numeracy).

Still, a lot of people certainly show interest in achieving the Ultimate American Dream. For the next President who ascends to the soiled and battered throne of George W. Bush, I say, good luck, sir or madam. I have a feeling the passage from 2009 to about 2020 is going to be a parlous time indeed. Bush's lab-concocted roosters (two-headed, purple and black, oozing pus, 4 feet high, fizzing with infection) currently fluttering into America's barnyard will roost there throughout his successor's tenure, whether one term or two, and I think it will be one. For a different bird and slightly different metaphor, think of Poe's Raven, perched outside the Oval Office Door. Nevermore, the easygoing dominance of America in the world. Nevermore the free ride.

Finances. The successor's term will be about finances. How dull and dreary for, say, Obama, to work upon a midnight, weary, trying to find some way out of the morass. I commend Chalmers Johnson's The Sorrows of Empire, published a few years ago, for a fuller account. (A personal note: Chalmers was a prof of mine at Berkeley, decades ago, when he was conservative and optimistic instead of one of Bush's most lacerating critics.) America is broke. Considering all of Bush's moronic ineptitude, nothing is going to be as immediate and terrifying as the money problems he will leave behind. It's sad that America never figured it out. We elected a spoiled scion who had never succeeded in any financial enterprise, who in fact wrecked the companies he directly controlled, and on whom a Harvard Business education was a joke, an excuse to get drunk and fuck around. A man with no judgment, no business acumen, no sense of budgetary priorities, who was always bailed out by paternalistic figures when he bottomed out - this is the clown we made President. Why didn't people see that his life-long habits would operate in precisely the same way once he became Chief Executive, that the approach would carry over and cause a financial meltdown on the biggest stage the world has ever seen?

The next President will inherit a country more than $9 trillion in debt, probably $10 trillion by the time Bush leaves, half of it "external;" that is, owed to real people or countries. Of the external debt of $5 trillion (by the time Shrub is done), $2.5 trillion will be owed to foreign countries, most of it on short-term obligations. $2.5 trillion is nearly as large as the current operating budget of the United States government. Since only about 70% of the current budget is funded by actual revenues (the rest is borrowed), it's obvious the United States doesn't have that kind of cash lying around. Virtually all of the sales of Treasury securities to external buyers, since Bush took office, have been to foreign central banks. It amounts to an immense Ponzi scheme; America borrows money to float its economy (and to finance Bush's wars), and then borrows the money necessary to service the debt on all the money it's borrowed in the past. A rather laughably transparent aspect of this practice has been the Fed's steady ratcheting of interest rates to "control inflation." Yes, we must keep this red hot American economy under control. Everyone is doing so well. A much more reassuring excuse than admitting that China, Japan and Saudi Arabia are losing interest in the paltry return on their reinvested dollars, especially with the dollar dropping through the floor, and are already diversifying in Euros and Asian currencies. The next President may have to deal with those blood-curdling words we've been dreading: Pay up.

And, around 2017 or so, the "surplus" in FICA taxes will plunge toward the X axis, and the Social Security Administration will lack the money necessary to pay the burgeoning numbers of Baby Boomers who are retiring, and will have to resort to the "trust fund" to make up the difference. There is, of course, no trust fund. All of the surpluses since about 1982 or so have been used by the federal government as "general revenue," and the markers for the pilfered cash, the paper instruments placed in that file cabinet in West Virginia (which Bush derided), will do no good. It is money the United States owes itself, and America isn't good for it. As bad as that situation is, it is nothing compared to Medicare. The exploding costs of medical care will combine with exploding numbers of Medicare recipients, and the system will simply crash. While Social Security is dire, the Medicare crisis is terminal, so that by the year 2019, 24% of all federal tax revenues will be spent propping up Medicare and Social Security, over and above the dedicated taxes (such as FICA) which already support the system. Indeed, the projected unfunded liabilities of the Social Security and Medicare systems greatly exceed the total net worth of the United States of America. And all of this, of course, is in addition to the national debt, and the escalating cost of servicing that huge yearly nut.

And how to deal with global warming? And a massive, dislocating shortage of oil to run the transportation system in the United States, which in most parts of the country amounts to the wherewithal to run the economy?

Bush decided to use his time in office to kick back, fuck around, and fight unnecessary wars. He thought that was his best chance for reelection, which was his only goal. The American people, in their mindless complacency, gave it to him. He didn't know the first thing about how to run a business, and he has left a financial catastrophe for his successor to clean up. When 2015 rolls around (or much sooner), Americans are not going to be talking about which humanitarian mission is a deserving recipient of their tax dollars, which nation we ought to "build" next, which planet to explore. Things are going to be far more basic than that. America is going to feel like a couple, no longer quite young, who went off on an eight-year drunk, a binge full of parties and high-def TVs and SUVs too big for the driveway, who came home to find the car had been repossessed, the power shut off, and the house foreclosed. And, naturally, since they're Americans, they'll look around for someone to blame, which might be a reason for any politician identified with the first decade of the 21st Century to go permanently to an undisclosed location.