On May 5, 2025, the debt of
the U.S. Government stood at $36.21 trillion, $28.9 trillion being held by the
public and $7.31 trillion being intragovernmental. That total is $1.66 trillion
more than the total federal public debt on May 5, 2024. Projected interest
payments of $952 billion in fiscal year 2025 would be 8 percent higher than the
interest payments made in 2024. By comparison, the U.S. budget for national
defense in fiscal year 2025 totaled $892.6 billion. Whether going to investors
of treasury bonds or defense contractors and other corporations, the combined
$1.85 trillion for fiscal 2025 represents a transfer payment to the wealthy
from American taxpayers rich, middle-class, and poor. Meanwhile, Republican
lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill in May, 2025 that
would subject Medicaid and food assistance to significantly less money and
subject the States with having to spend more on the administration of those programs.
Principles of political ideology reside just below the surface. My task here is
to flush them out and relate them to each other, rather than to impose my own ideology.
Fresh out of the Trump Administration,
billionaire Elon Musk called the tax and spending bill a “disgusting
abomination.”[1] Presumably
this condemnation has to do with the “multi-trillion tax breaks” and the
raising of the debt ceiling an additional $4 trillion, but the CEO of SpaceX
would hardly object to the increase for defense.[2]
Musk wrote that the “outrageous, pork-filled” bill would “massively increase
the already gigantic budget deficit to $2.5 trillion” in spite of the cuts to healthcare
and food for the poor that Musk supported.[3]
U.S. Sen. Rand Paul promised to vote against the bill unless the debt ceiling
would not be raised.
As of early June, 2025, who
could say whether Republican opposition in the U.S. Senate would actually
materialize beyond the rhetoric designed to give an impression of objection to
voters back home. The Republican lawmakers in the House had quickly closed
ranks to pass the House bill. Behind the numbers are values and ideological principles
that can be difficult to see. Cutting federal programs that help the poor with subsistence
living, such as with food and healthcare, can be said to imply a lack of
compassion, especially if defense contractors would be getting more business
from the federal government, but two political principles are also in play.
One is the belief that the
role of government should not include providing even the basics to people;
charities and families should supply basic needs to the poor. Overlaid with that
principle is one concerning American federalism, wherein the federal government
was originally intended to have very limited powers, and one way of limiting
them was to make regulating interstate commerce and providing a common defense
primary, with other domains of power being handled by the States. This
principle is in accord with the differences between States in an empire-scale
federal union of states because the state governments can more tightly match social
programs with the political ideology of a majority of the voters in a state
than can be done by Congress.
These two principles—the first
being more general and the second more particular to the American federal philosophy—are
not fully consistent, for according to the federal principle, Congress should
take care that the state governments are not crowded out in taxing more so as
to take on more in domestic programs—domestic being here within a given state.
Whereas the view that the proper roles of government do not include making
goods and services available to citizens applies to the States too, the principle
of federalism favors expanding the taxing and spending abilities of the States
according to how much of an entitlement-providing responsibility each state
government wants, as per the relevant political ideology of the majority of the
citizens of a state.
Re-balancing American
federalism so the States regain some of authority that they once had should
include managing the transition especially concerning programs relied on by the
poor because they are vulnerable to suffering and even dying by slipping between
the cracks. Relatedly, because in at least some of the several States, the
majority of people believe that government should supply the poor with
necessities, the more general political principle that government itself should
not supply goods and services to individual citizens should give way to the
second, federal principle. Put another way, were Congress to vote to restrict
government itself, then more expansive ideologies in at least some States would
be choked off. The general government principle should be decided therefore on
the state level rather than by Congress.
Taking a page from the E.U.,
the U.S. member-states could conceivably be given more responsibility in
funding defense beyond just militias, which are armies that the U.S. President
can borrow. Not that the head of state of California should step over the federal
president on defense policy as Macron of the E.U. state of France did in trying
to head the E.U.’s defense policy against Russia in 2025. The defense budget of
the U.S. Government could be reduced and the states could do more without the
latter superseding the former. Together with transferring more non-interstate-commerce
domestic programs to the states, the federal deficits could be reduced. President
Reagan failed to rebalance American federalism because he favored the more
general restrictive-government-role principle and thus did not facilitate
states making up for federal cuts in domestic spending. To be sure, the state
governments would have done so to various extents, given their distinct
political climates.
Restoring power to the member-states heeds the fact
that over a continent and beyond, one size (of public policy) does not fit all
(States). Curtailing both federal defense and domestic spending while reducing
federal taxation by less than the combined cuts but enough that state taxing
abilities would no longer be crowded out from expanding to meet the incoming transfer
of programs would put the federal government on the road to fiscal
responsibility—meaning being able at some point to pay off its debt—while giving
the state governments back more of the authority they had when the federal
system was designed and put into operation. The horrendous fiscal imbalance of
the U.S. (federal) Government can be interpreted as pointing, in effect, to how
imbalanced the federal system itself has become. No one at the U.S. Constitutional
Convention envisioned the federal level as handling everything of substance
while the state governments become like municipal governments, so it should be no
surprise that such a lack of fit would be reflected in a massive fiscal
imbalance on the federal level.
