George W. Bush's Coup de Grace

The latest figures available for fiscal year 2009 (that ending September 30, 2009) indicate that the federal deficit for the year so far is about $232 billion.  This represents the deficit for the month of October just past.  Annualized, the deficit for the year at this rate, in other words, would reach $2,784,000,000,000, or nearly 3 trillion dollars. We have, ladies and gentlemen, entered the Realm of Weimar, that crucial threshold where all semblance of rationality, manageability, and sanity is gone.  Our situation is now analogous to the coked-out movie star who has become indifferent to the repo men who have scaled the security gate and are systematically hotwiring and driving off his Rolls-Royces, and hijacking his Gulfstream Jets in midflight and and holding auctions of his Beverly Hills mansions - but not only indifferent, but manically screaming that he needs more coke and whores and tells his henchman, as he waves his gun around, that he demands a new Mercedes and a villa on Como.

You know, that point at which it's a joke to imagine any realistic way out of it. Congress is frantically "authorizing" "money" to buy all the investment banks, recapitalize all the commercial banks, buy AIG, salvage the Big 3 auto makers, and omigod! what just happened over there! There are so many "programs" to save so many vital aspects of the American economy that we haven't had time to sit down and calmly appreciate that this is madness.  The federal government was broke before it started doing all this.  Its Triple A credit rating was already in doubt.  If we push the national debt to $20 trillion, and if $15 trillion of that is "true" debt owed to outside creditors (and not to the bankrupt Social Security & Medicare funds); and if we have to pay 10% interest to attract all the money we need to borrow, isn't it obvious the major part of the federal budget will be used increasingly to pay interest on what we just borrowed? Nobel Prize winning columnist Paul Krugman is urging Obama to "go big" to get the U.S. economy moving again; in other words, ignore the deficits and move full-speed ahead. I guess so - if the collective worldwide hallucination of American solvency is not disturbed, that's what Obama will have to do.

George W. Bush is going out in a blaze of destruction, that we can clearly see.  With just over two months left, Bush could not quite get the pneumatic jacks to work well enough to hold up the White House roof long enough for him to get to Dallas.  Like Maxwell Smart, he missed it by that much. I saw him yesterday giving a brief talk to the Manhattan Club, extolling the wonders of the free market, gloating over the failed economy of Cuba, smirking, winking, wrinkling that narrow brow. The whole shtick.  I noticed that the jaw twitch was back in force; it's a spasmodic sideways jerking of his lower jaw while his mouth is held slightly open.  I don't know what it means.  Some have suggested it's a tic symptomatic of central nervous system damage brought about by substance abuse.  At this point, it's not even really interesting to speculate anymore.  Of course there are serious things wrong with him, but the true thing is that he's been President for the last eight years.  Of that we can be sure.

The graphs in the upper left were put together by a talented scientist in the Southwestern United States.  They depict slopes based on 3rd order polynomial calculations and offer graphic evidence of what happened to the United States once we abandoned the principle of intelligent management in favor of amiable idiots appealing to "values voters."  America had experimented with idiots before.  Warren G. Harding, Herbert Hoover, for example.  However, the drastic consequences of entrusting a system as complex as the American economy to dumb guys included the Great Depresssion, so that the electorate was chastened into voting once again for competence. For a long time, then, we placed the stewardship of the United States only in the hands of intelligent, competent leadership: FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Carter.  

But as Santayana warned us, those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.  So we elected the first of the amiable dunces, Ronald Reagan, who made all kinds of stupid pronouncements about the "irrelevance" of federal deficits, or the principle of fiscal prudence in general, and who went on a spree of massive military spending while simultaneously drastically reducing the government's primary source of revenue.  Reagan saw the government as the enemy, although the government, really, is just us. So we declared war on ourselves, and we won.  And lost.  We followed Reagan up with the first of the Bushes, then took a shot at another smart guy, and look what happened?  Even working against a Republican Congress for six of his eight years, a Congress which wanted to attack and hamstring him with endless moralistic crusades throughout his tenure, Clinton began to bring the financial house back to some semblance of order, even to produce a budget surplus in his last couple of years.  And then Bush II:  the Coup de Grace, finishing the dark work of Reagan and his father.

With the sort of prudent guidance which Al Gore would naturally have carried forward, that hypothetical extension in graph #2 could have been our reality.  We would have innovated, dealt with global warming, adapted to changing circumstances, revitalized the economy. Gone $20 trillion in the black, enough to do whatever we needed to do to change energy paradigms. Alas, it was not to be.  For 20 of the last 28 years, we have squandered our resources, bankrupted our country, fought needless, ruinous wars, and destroyed the legacy of America for our children.  At a point very soon, the world is going to finally, regretfully conclude that the USA does not have all the money it is "spending" to bail itself out of every exploding catastrophe.  We are in the position of a man standing on a ladder, a few feet short of the roof, trying vainly to lift the ladder with his own hands.  It is entirely possible the world will not allow us to forget this particular lesson of history and make the same mistake all over again.