Forget the debt ceiling, the entire roof is collapsing on America
The dismantling of the United States as a normal, functional nation state continues. America’s gun neuralgia continues to worsen, and now we see new evidence that its fiscal neuralgia – a phobia for properly funded government – is deepening, too.
The commitment to unchecked mass murder of its citizens through preventable gun violence is as entrenched in America as it is incomprehensible to every other developed nation. Even after so many mass shootings, so much wanton murder, death’s dismal Danse Macabre through US society can still shock. In 2020, guns became the leading cause of death among American children aged 19 and under.
And even when Congress managed in June last year to agree to some token federal efforts to monitor gun sales, the very next day the Supreme Court overturned a New York state attempt to control handgun purchases.
In its pursuit of this madness, America is discarding one of civilisation’s greatest achievements.
When kings and potentates decided to control citizenry’s arms and assert that the state would monopolise the use of force, it produced the most consistent reduction in violence in history, according to Harvard’s Steven Pinker:
‘‘When bands, tribes and chiefdoms came under the control of the first states, the suppression of raiding and feuding reduced their rates of violent death fivefold,’’ he writes in The Better Angels of Our Nature. ‘‘And when the fiefs of Europe coalesced into kingdoms and sovereign states, the consolidation of law enforcement eventually brought down the homicide rate another thirty-fold. Pockets of anarchy that lay beyond the reach of government retained their violent culture.’’
And while the political right largely is responsible for the fierce refusal to regulate firearms, the American left is playing its own part in this trend to mayhem. The movement to ‘‘defund the police’’ is a return to the law of the jungle by another route.
As for the US resistance to funding its government properly, the latest evidence is contained in the agreement between Republicans and Democrats over the government debt ceiling. The headline news is not the bad news.
The world is sighing with relief that the White House and Congress have struck an inprinciple agreement to allow US government debt to increase. This means the government will still be able to pay its debts.
To do otherwise, of course, would be for the US effectively to repudiate its outstanding Treasury bonds. It would have run out of money to service its debts on June 5. The US could not expect to retain its status as the global reserve currency if it did so. The Chinese Communist Party would have been the biggest winner as America surrendered any claim to be a responsible nation.
One measure of the self-harm that would have been inflicted by an American debt default is that Donald Trump thought it was a good idea. ‘‘You might as well do it now because you’ll do it later,’’ he said.
No, the bad news was contained in the terms of the agreement itself.
Joe Biden campaigned for the presidency on the promise to increase funding of the US tax office, the Internal Revenue Service. Why? The reason was twofold. First, to allow the IRS to better enforce tax law. The prime targets were to be the biggest evaders, the irresponsible rich. Second, to offer better customer service with new computer systems. Biden’s Democrats succeeded in allocating an extra US$80 billion a year to the IRS accordingly.
But in the negotiations over the national debt limit, the Republicans demanded that this extra IRS funding be cancelled. The outcome was a compromise – Biden got to keep US$10b to improve customer service, but the tax office lost the US$70b for chasing tax evaders.
It’s bad enough that the US political system operates under the expectation that the national budget will not be approved in the manner long considered ‘‘normal’’. That is, it used to be ‘‘normal’’ that an annual set of appropriations bills was approved by Congress and signed by the president by the end of the US fiscal year on September 30, ready to fund the government for the new year beginning on October 1. But the last time the US managed to pass a traditional, orderly budget for a whole year – a ‘‘normal’’ budget – was 1998.
American politics has become so fractious that stopgaps, emergency funding and perpetual negotiations have kept the government lurching from crisis to crisis for a quarter of a century. This has now become the new normal.
And it’s bad enough that this has put the US into a perpetual state of argument over whether to ‘‘shut down’’ the national government or to keep it ‘‘open’’. As if a functioning national government is some sort of luxury.
One result has been increasingly frequent government shutdowns – 1995, 2013, 2018, 2019. It’s normal for legislators to negotiate over how much tax to raise and money to spend. But it’s not normal for a developed nation to accept continuous fiscal brinkmanship and threats of government shutdown.
But now, on top of all that, and on top of a game of debt default chicken, we see a new Republican priority to starve the IRS of funds. Why? So that Americans with the means to avoid paying taxes can do so. The Republicans want to make it optional for the rich to pay tax.
Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, founder of the Club for Growth, famously said in 2001 that he didn’t want to abolish the US government: ‘‘I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.’’
Today’s Congressional Republicans appear determined to fulfil his wish. Among the field of candidates lining up to contest the Republican presidential nomination is the little-known entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. He proposes abolishing the IRS altogether.
Trump threatens the survival of US democracy. But America’s restless struggle against the very concepts of governance and government increasingly threatens the survival of a normal, functional nation state.