The U.S. Government’s Debt: Federalism Unbalanced

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.

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1. Bernd Debusmann, “Musk Calls Trump’s Tax Bill a ‘Disgusting Abomination’,” BBC.com, June 3, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

On the U.S. Government’s Budget Deficits and Debt: American Democracy Unhinged

It is true that a government’s budget can be read as a blueprint of priorities in terms of what is valued, and what is not so highly valued. The blueprint itself, as a whole, also evinces a priority in terms of values. As the big-ticket items, such as large spending categories and massive tax-cuts, get the most attention, whether a budget is in balance can go by the wayside, and what that says about the electorate (and thus the state of democracy) can easily be missed. Ultimately, public policy and even the votes of the elected representatives point back to the popular sovereign, the People—more specifically, the electorate, and its values. By 2024, the deficit and accumulated debt of the U.S. Government had reached such gigantic numbers that something could be said to be amiss concerning those values. The underlying culprit, which can be said to be an illness that is human, all too human, had by then infected American democracy beyond the wherewithal of virtually any elected federal representative to enunciate well enough that the electorate could look clearly at itself, and thus size itself up beyond the partial diagnoses that can be found in partisan attacks.

In late June, 2024, the (nonpartisan) Congressional Budget Office forecasted a $2 trillion deficit for the year, up from an earlier estimate of $1.6 trillion.[1] At the time, the federal accumulated debt stood at $34 trillion. Whereas in the 1970s, the debt as a percent of GNP was in the low 30s, the percentage for 2023 stood at just over 120 percent. Clearly, the trajectory of deficits and debt was disproportionate even on a percentage basis. Furthermore, interest payments made by the U.S. Government, which the CBO director said were “large by historical standards,”[2] were poised to exceed the entire defense budget in 2024; and that recipients of interest-bearing bonds tend to be on the wealthy side, whereas the poor and middle-class pay taxes, the ballooning debt could be viewed as an engine of wealth-transfer from the poor to the rich via the U.S. Government, hence increasing economic inequality as an indirect effect of fiscal public policy. In short, something systemic was out of balance, with ethical implications.

Blaming large ticket items (i.e., federal spending) provides us with an easy target but only gets at a symptom. Regarding the 2024 fiscal year, the Congressional Budget Office pointed to the $145 billion cost of the President’s changes to student loans and the $95 billion foreign aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan enacted in April as the two largest factors.[3] Almost a trillion dollars for three countries. Healthcare costs came in third.

To be sure, the changes in student-loan policy under President Biden were in large part due to the spurious vocational claims of for-profit “universities and feckless accrediting agencies, with unemployed former students as the victims. The foreign-aid spending was associated with foreign policy objectives—holding back Russia and sending a message that military aggression (by Russia) is no longer acceptable in the 21^st century being foremost. In short, both deficit-growing factors were oriented to protecting victims, and thus could be justified ethically. Increased public health-insurance costs too can be justified ethically, given the value of health irrespective of income and wealth.

Even lofty goals come with costs, however, which may not be affordable. A sovereign government with the authority to “print money” need not be constrained by what it can afford, absent constitutional language mandating a balanced budget. Of course, spending is only half of the deficit equation; taxation being the other. That spending had been outstripping revenue since the Clinton administration can be traced back to the Reagan tax cuts. Regarding the deficit in 2024, the Trump tax cuts should also be remembered. Moreover, the refusal of Congresses and presidents to raise taxes to cover increases in spending when the economy is fine or (especially) good is also a factor in how the U.S. Government’s debt got to $34 trillion.

Both the proclivity to increase government spending and the reluctance to increase taxes (or defeat tax-cut proposals) leads us directly “under the hood” to popular sovereignty: Government by the People. That is to say, the American electorate is ultimately to blame for not electing representatives, senators, and presidents who resist the twin temptations. To be sure, differing political ideologies on the proper size of government, and, more specifically, the federal government, are also legitimate in voting decisions.

A believer in a small federal government, harkening back to Thomas Jefferson, might vote for candidates in favor of tax cuts in order to “starve” the federal government. But this strategy ignores the unlimited ability of that government to enact spending bills. A “small government” ideology should go after spending and taxes with enough tax revenue over spending in the out years to pay off the accumulated debt.

A believer in a large federal government (in absolute terms and relative to those of the states) has no problem resisting tax-cut proposals; it is the notion that a government can or should grow by increased spending, especially without increased taxation to cover both the additional spending and to pay off the accumulated debt, that is problematic.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, the U.S. deficits (and debt) were significant in political discourse. David Stockton, President Reagan’s head of the OMB (Office of Management and Budget), wrote The Triumph of Politics to explain why Reagan failed to bring down the deficit numbers. The imbalance was in the public’s aversion to cutting domestic spending, Reagan’s increase in defense spending, and the president’s tax-cuts. In terms of the American electorate, the desire for immediate consumption, which includes tax-cuts, combined with the lack of responsibility can be cited as the ultimate source of the imbalance that may be inherent in democracy itself.

It is significant that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams agreed long after they were out of the political arena that a viable republic requires an educated and virtuous citizenry. Put another way, self-government requires a sense of responsibility in terms of fiscal governance. That the debt of the U.S. Government had been allowed to reach $34 trillion by 2024 can be interpreted as a verdict, or an x-ray, on just how fit the American electorate had been to govern itself through its chosen representatives. The real threat to American democracy lies within. The threat, in fact, by 2024 may have become much more serious than even that of unbalanced fiscal policy.  For the proverbial invisible “elephant in the room” may no longer have merely been the failure of the American electorate to exercise its popular sovereignty with fiscal responsibility on governmental taxation and spending: the rising unexamined question may ironically have already relegated fiscal responsibility altogether in silently asking whether $34 trillion ever gets paid off. Like an insect whose legs are still twitching even though it is already dead, the U.S. Government may have already been effectively bankrupt without anyone realizing it. If this was already de facto the case by 2024, then the damning verdict, not seen yet in plain sight, would be on another level entirely. 

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1. Jennifer Scholtes, “$2T in Red Ink: Foreign Aid, Biden’s Student Loan Policies Hike U.S. Deficit Forecast,” Politico, June 18, 2024 (accessed June 22, 2024).
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

American religion and politics: Overreaching Realms

Even though they are formally separated in the U.S. under the constitutional rubric that the federal government cannot lawfully establish a religion and infringe on the free exercise of religion, religion has ventured into politics and vice versa. Valued ideals pertain to both even though the highest in religion are transcendent, meaning that they extend beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility, according to St. Denis (aka Pseudo-Dionysius) in the sixth century. So far is the political variety from such ideals as being in heaven! Yet the political sort has enjoyed a near monopoly in the world, including its public discourse. At least as 2019 was giving way to a new decade, captivation on President Trump’s tweets (i.e., brief statements made on the internet’s social media) and the process of impeaching him in the U.S. House of Representatives was strangely devoid of any religious discussion in the public square. This is all the more extraordinary because of the significant role that religion had played historically in presidential politics.

During the U.S. presidential campaign of 1928, for example, Al Smith was chastised for being a Catholic, and therefore thought to be under the sway of the Pope in Rome. During the campaign of 1960, John F. Kennedy found himself subject to the same charge. The simple assumption of papal dictate turned out to be naïve. For one thing, the American presidency is firmly within the governmental realm, and the Second Amendment bars the use of the office to establish (or give preference to) a religion or sect/denomination thereof. Kennedy ran against Richard M. Nixon, whose Quaker background, which presumably disdained lying, turned out in his own presidency (1968-1974) to be particularly lacking as revealed in the Watergate hearings. In short, the impact of a president’s inner religious sense and identity on his conduct (and mentality) can be massively overstated.

The role of religion in politics has been present, however, in reactions to the assumed, overstated impact of a candidate’s religion on his role should he get to the office. For example, based on the overblown fears held by protestant Americans, some protestant leaders, including Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham, and their allies in the political realm were able to gain popularity and power. Graham secretly met with other protestant pastors in 1960 to coordinate campaigning against Kennedy, essentially capitalizing on the popular fear among Protestants. This movement in turn prompted Kennedy to give a speech on September 12, 1960 to the Houston Ministerial Association. He insisted that his Catholicism would not direct or obstruct his policy-making judgment. Interestingly, the push of religion into the political sphere was made by religious figures ostensibly in the religious realm—overextending into the other realm.

In 1980, however, a presidential candidate by the name of Ronald Reagan realized that politicians like himself could make use of the political lobbying of religious leaders and groups. Implicitly, he showed Americans just how trivial the political divide had really been between Catholics and Protestants in presidential politics. While Reagan was still the governor of California in the 1970’s, Phyllis Schlafly, a Catholic, was reaching out to evangelical women to lobby against the Equal Rights Amendment (for women). Along with evangelical political action committees, she established the Eagle Forum in the next decade, when Ronald Reagan was president of the United States. By the time he was in office, he had already realized that he could publically galvanize evangelicals and conservative Catholics to support his political ambitions.

With the political realm dipping into the religious realm and vice versa, the societal issue of abortion also played an important role at the time in uniting socially conservative Protestants and Catholics. After the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade in 1973, Francis Schaeffer brought in prominent evangelicals including Jerry Falwell to oppose abortion politically. Gay marriage in the early 2000’s would play a similar role in uniting the division that had hitherto hampered Al Smith and John Kennedy. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council, which had formed in the 1980s during Reagan’s flourishing years in office, pushed what they publicized as family values against both abortion and gay marriage. Both Focus and the Council were both church-related and lobbyists close to the Republican Party. For example, the groups lobbied for conservative fiscal policies—something near and dear to the Party but less obviously based in Christianity, especially as Jesus espouses giving to the poor and giving up one’s wealth to follow him. The rich man getting into the Kingdom of Heaven is like getting a camel through a needle. Even so, the evangelical lobbying groups became wealthy, using the prosperity gospel from the Old Testament—that God would make Israel prosperous if it keeps the covenant—as a rationale. To be sure, the pro-wealth paradigm had long become dominant over the anti-wealth paradigm, which hitherto had been dominant.[1] Perhaps this shift within Christianity made it easier for evangelical/Catholic political groups to not only pursue wealth themselves, but also appeal to the Republican Party that Reagan had made (i.e., fiscal and social conservatism). 

 

In conclusion, Americans could look back by the end of the twentieth century and see the old religious division as politically artificial, and thus not nearly as important as Americans had believed in 1928 and 1960. But could those same Americans see their contemporary divisions as just as artificial or at least over-drawn? In the Middle Ages amid the Commercial Revolution, the sin of usury (i.e., charging interest on loaned funds) was the moral/religious/political controversy in Europe. By Reagan’s time, the charging of interest even on consumption loans was a dead issue, whereas abortion could be viewed as an extremely important matter. Could this presumed overriding importance of the issue of the day be questioned by looking back at how the salience of the usury debate had run its course in its own time? In other words, in matters of religion and politics, and even their intermeshing, can the human mind put even its most cherished ideals in proper perspective? Can we question our own presumed importance, including that of our ideological ideals, whether religious or political (or both!)?

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1. Skip Worden, God’s Gold (1915), available at Amazon.

Limits to Overused Fiscal and Monetary Policy Can Result in Self-Induced Governmental Impotence

“The [U.S.] federal budget deficit is growing faster than expected as President Trump’s spending and tax cut policies force the United States to borrow increasing sums of money.”[1] This observation was made just after the Federal Reserve Bank relented under pressure from the White House to lower interest rates because bond investors had been investing with a possible future recession in mind. With the U.S. Government’s accumulated debt standing at $22.4 trillion and interest rates already low, the limits to both fiscal and monetary policy were apparent even if most Americans in the political and business elite were focused on avoiding a possible recession in 2020.

According to the Congressional Budget Office in August, 2019, the federal deficit for fiscal 2019 would reach $960 billion; the deficit for the next year would reach $1 trillion.[2] Back during the Reagan administration in the 1980’s, deficits were in the hundreds of billions and the debt was in the trillions. It would seem that the fiscal imbalance had gotten worse since then, in spite of the fact that recessionary periods were greatly outweighed by stretches of growth. In fact, the U.S. in 2019 was in its longest period of economic expansion. Yet the deficits and thus debt rose rather than dropped. President’s tax cuts in that period of expansion played a significant role. Tax revenues for 2018 and 2019 fell more than $430 billion short of what the Congressional Budget Office had predicted.[3] In August of 2019, the president made public his consideration of payroll tax cuts just to guard against a possible recession (especially if one should hit before the next election day).

Using recessionary fiscal tools during an economic expansion means the deficits in good times won’t counter those in bad times. The result in the case of the U.S. has been a steadily increasing accumulated debt, rather than a debt from bad times being paid off in good times. That’s the fiscal theory, but it ignores the insatiable desire for instant gratification in human nature that can easily find power in a representative democracy. Accordingly, the use of leverage, or debt, by a democratic government should be extremely limited; tax cuts during periods of expansion can be seen as a red flag that a government has already gone too far.

Fortunately, lower than expected interest rates even before the Fed’s announced rate cut in August, 2019, reduced the amount of money the U.S. Treasury had to pay to its borrowers. So the public as well as policy makers could conveniently overlook the fact that the projected deficit for fiscal year 2019 was 25% higher than the prior year’s deficit. One weakness of a democracy is that if things look ok on the surface, needed work on the fundamentals—the substratum—will likely be put off. It’s more understandable that the electorate would have this weakness—less so for the elected representatives who know or should know the fundamentals and look out for the fiscal balance of the government. Speaking of balance, it is interesting that the federal system too was so much out of balance with the federal level holding most of the governmental power even though the States technically still had residual sovereignty. In other words, the tremendous fiscal imbalance can be viewed as an indication or manifestation of a more fundamental imbalance in the U.S. system of governments. In contrast, the E.U. suffered from an imbalance in the other direction, as the state governments anxiously guarded most of their powers.

See: Skip Worden, Essays on Two Federal Empires. Available at Amazon.

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1. Jim Tankersley and Emily Cochrane, “Budget Deficit Is Set to Surge Past $1 Trillion,” The New York Times, August 22, 2019.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

Raising Retirement Ages in the E.U.: The Case of Spain

The New York Times reported in 2012, “Spain has a stubbornly high budget deficit, its banks require tens of billions of euros in rescue loans and the government may soon have little choice but to request bailout funds” from the E.U.’s “TARP” program. Nevertheless, the state government’s “budget would actually increase pension payouts 1 percent [in 2013]. The money includes not only pensions for former public employees, but also the social security payments that go to all retired [residents].”[1] Pension expenditures represented nearly 40 percent of the state's budget and 9 percent of the state’s economic output, so one would think that line-item would have been first up on the chopping block. To be sure, cutting sustenance programs such as pensions could actually exacerbate a government's debt because if a resulting decline in demand adds to unemployment. In this case, the politics in the state seems to have gone along with the economics. I submit that Spain could have gone further economically were it not for entitlement politics interlarding the retirement-age issue.
Delaying the increase in the retirement age in Spain from 65 to 67 until 2027 could be seen as a case of politics operating at the expense of what was most needed economically. Given the advances in modern medicine and the universal health-care systems in the E.U., even 67 have been too low and too late. 
Firstly, in the 2010's, the E.U. would struggle with immigration even as more workers were needed. The failure of politics in the state of Spain to jack up the retirement age significantly as early as 2013 may therefore have been a contributing factor in shortchanging the local residents from satisfying the state's need for labor. 

Do the state governments have too much power at the federal level? If so, are Greece and Spain paying the price of the self-interest of more dominant states?  

The E.U. state of Greece demonstrates that going just from 65 to 67 can indeed be accomplished legislatively in a year, even with political protests. “For Greece, the longtime generosity of its pension system — in which large numbers were previously allowed to retire at 50 and younger — came to define the bankrupt condition of the Greek state. In the years before the crisis hit, pension payments in Greece totaled as much as 14 percent” of the state’s economic output.[2] Spain too could have used the decrease in pension costs that a relatively quick raise to 67 would have engendered. Raising the age is distinct from cutting pension amounts, yet the austerity-bred entitlement politics may have spilled onto the age issue. 
Raising the retirement age can be distinguished from the cuts in monthly entitlement programs, such as in the lender-imposed austerity program in Greece. If heath-related exceptions can be made to a higher retirement age based on a generally longer human lifespan, then cutting entitlement programs more than raising the retirement age puts lives at risk. This difference may have been lost in the politics of raising the retirement age in Spain.

1. Landon Thomas, “Pension Dilemma in Europe’s Debt Crisis,” The New York Times, September 30, 2012.
2. Ibid.

Beyond Fixing the U.S. Government's Debt

After a number of failed attempts over decades to solve a problem, it is natural that the problem itself would barely get mentioned, let alone any cure. I submit that the U.S. federal debt is a case in point. President Reagan made it an issue in 1980, and Congress has tried to mandate for itself automatic spending cuts and tax increases, but to no avail. The desire for instant gratification outstripped self-discipline. This could perhaps be said of the society generally. 
In anticipation of the “fiscal cliff” steep U.S. tax increases and budget cuts that were set to go into effect January 2013 for a decade, Moody’s Investor Service served notice to Americans and their federal government that the sequestration of $1 trillion over the ten years and the immediate end of the Bush Tax Cuts would mean a downgrade in the credit rating of the U.S. Government. The New York Times reported that the rating agency, like S&P before, “emphasized political dysfunction more than soaring government debt. The agency said that Washington must come to agreement to head off billions of dollars in simultaneous tax increases and spending cuts scheduled to begin in January—and to put the government on a sustainable fiscal trajectory. Only then would the United States keep its AAA rating.”[1] Moody’s pointed to the need for “specific policies that produce a stabilization and then [a] downward trend in the ratio of federal debt to G.D.P. over the medium term.”[2] 

Moody's Investor Services     (Reuters)

Significant reductions in spending over ten years, plus an immediate end of the tax-rate reductions that George W. Bush had signed into law, would presumably have produced a downward trend in the ratio of federal debt to G.D.P. over the medium as well as long term unless a recessionary impact would be such as to counter the effect from the sequestration and tax increases. Pressure would have built to exempt spending on unemployment compensation and other sustenance programs, while the tax revenue would have fallen short. In other words, the sequestration, had it been allowed, would not have been a sure thing in reducing the federal debt. 
As of June, 2019, the debt stood at over $22 trillion. The will in a democratic system to take corrective action can be so deficient that a serious problem can get much worse. Whereas the rating agencies were ready to downgrade the U.S. Government's credit rating when the debt stood at $16.7 trillion, no such warning went up six years later when the debt was substantially more and no hint of any sequestration was in the air. 
Ronald Reagan had made balancing the federal budget a salient part of his 1980 platform, though once in office he pushed for tax cuts and increases in defense spending that undercut prospects for a balanced budget. The experiment in whether cutting taxes could actually boost tax revenue due to more economic activity failed. In 2013, sequestration failed even to launch. It is no wonder that as the debt passed the $20 trillion mark, the political discourse had given up on a cure. That such a debt might be too big to be paid off, that the U.S. Government was de facto already out of reach, was never mentioned even in conversation. 

1. Jonathan Weisman, “Moody’s Warns That U.S. May Face Debt Downgrade,” The New York Times, September 12, 2012.
2. Ibid.

Misconceptions of the E.U. Budget

Could it be that at least some of the British voters who were in favor of secession from the E.U. held misconceptions of the federal budget? If so, perhaps the antagonism was unduly harsh in the referendum.  
So many misconceptions have existed regarding the E.U.’s budget that the European Commission published a “myth-buster” page on its web-site in 2013. As against the claim that the E.U.’s budget was enormous, for example, the Commission pointed out that the 2011 budget was about €140 billion, while the combined budgets of the 27 states were €6.3 trillion. In fact, the E.U.’s budget was less than that of the budgets of medium-sized states, such as Austria and Belgium. Whereas the E.U. budget represented about 1% of the E.U.’s GDP (the total value of all goods and services produced in the E.U.), the typical state’s budget was 44% of the state’s GDP. Relative to economic activity, the E.U. budget was not enormous, the Commission concluded.
In terms of the growth of the E.U. budget, the Commission pointed out that between 2000 and 2010, the state budgets had increased by 62% while the E.U. budget had increased by only 37 percent. Lest it be argued that the state budgets had been more democratically determined, the European Parliament, the members of which are directly elected by E.U. citizens, must approve the E.U. budget.
Regarding the misconception that most of the E.U. budget went to administration, the Commission pointed out that administrative expenses amounted to less than 6% of the total 2011 E.U. budget, with salaries accounting for half of that 6 percent. More than 94% of the budget, according to the Commission, “goes to citizens, regions, cities, farmers and businesses.” In this regard, the federal spending was not much different than state spending. In fact, state and local officials typically selected the E.U.-sponsored projects best suited to the officials’ respective areas.
Lastly, regarding the misconception that most of the E.U. budget has gone to farmers, direct aid to farmers and market-related programs was just 30% of the budget in 2011, and rural development spending was only 11 percent. For perspective, around 70% of the EC’s budget in 1985 was spent on agriculture. Put another way, the E.U. had diversified, hence reaching more citizens.

Source:

“Myths and Facts,” E.U. Commission.

Monetary and Fiscal Policy and Structural Reform: Each Had a Role to Play after the Financial Crisis

With fiscal policy hamstrung by public debt in both the E.U. and U.S., monetary policy was a major beneficiary of the financial crisis of 2008 and the ensuing state-debt crisis that stammered on at least until 2013 in Europe. Lest it be concluded that central bank policy had reached an unassailable peak of salvation, the expanded role actually made its limitations transparent, at least in financial circles.
Speaking to Charlie Rose on March 11, 2013, Jeremy Grantham of a Wall Street firm argued that the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank's extremely low interest-rate policy would be unlikely to spark an increase in employment even in the severe recession following the financial crisis. In fact, a low interest rate is a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. Fiscal policy, such as the Conservation Civilians Corps of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s, is a much better tool to achieve full employment. Yet even the New Deal did not have enough fire-power to bring the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression; it took the breaking out of a second world war to get America's military-industrial complex to create enough jobs. One implication is that a competitive market alone is not sufficient to reach full employment. Even though such a market can sport great efficiency if kept competitive by the enforcement of anti-trust law, natural consumption levels have been unable to spark enough jobs for full employment to be achieved. Not even low interest rates can do that, as per the decade of the 2010's. We ought to accept that a lot of fiscal stimulus is needed to achieve full employment, even if it is not optimally efficient. 
Meanwhile, Jens Weidmann, the president of the Bundesbank, argued that monetary policy in the E.U. “can only buy time at best..” He went on to say he was “a bit concerned about some of the expectations around the power and potential of monetary policy.”[1] In other words, the ECB should have gotten back to monetary policy in a stricter sense, rather than trying to spark economic growth and employment through low interest rates and buying state-government bonds.
Behind the view of interest-rate, or monetary, policy as being capable of giving us economic salvation was the paralysis of fiscal policy determination in both federal unions.  Divided government at the federal level stymied fiscal policy in the U.S. after President Obama’s insufficient “stimulus” package in 2010. In the E.U., the vetoes retained by the fiscally- and debt-conservative state governments such as Germany at the federal level through the European Council put pressure on state governments strapped fiscally to take on even more debt even just to avoid defaulting on existing debt, not to mention keeping their fiscal policy-levels sufficient that their residents would not be imperiled. Increasing debt-loads for fiscal reasons did not serve states like Greece and Spain well. Fiscal redistribution at the federal level is one of the benefits of federalism, and yet the E.U. was stymied because each state government had too much power at the federal level (quite unlike the states in the U.S. at its federal level). 
In short, much of the allure of monetary policy actually came from fiscal frustration at the federal levels of both unions. Alternatively, both fiscal and monetary policy could have been used, and pointed in the same direction: toward full employment. Using low interest rates and the issuance of debt, respectively, to pull up an economy out of severe recession and even as political coverage (in the U.S.) or leverage (in the E.U.) for needed structural reforms of a financial system and indebted states, respectively, may not have been sufficient or even smart. Taking on a corruption-induced financial system in the U.S. required a lot of political guts, which not even the Obama administration had, for the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 did not go far enough in deconstructing the conflicts of interest in the system. Also, feeding Wall Street with infusions of government money appropriated by Congress and much more created by the Federal Reserve Bank, with no strings attached, did not make the bankers at the big banks any more willing to accept structural reforms even though they would have protected the banks by fixing the system. Not even fiscal stimulus plus low interest rates could keep the U.S. out of a severe recession, though arguably the U.S. could have entered a severe depression otherwise. Both fiscal and monetary policy and going politically after dysfunctional systems, whether that of Wall Street or those of heavily-indebted E.U. states, all must be used so none of the tools is over-relied upon and thus overused.  

See Institutional Conflicts of Interest, Essays on the Financial Crisis, and Essays on the E.U. Political Economy. All are available at Amazon.

1. Katy Barnato, “Central Banks Alone Can’t Fix Europe: Weidmann,” CNBC, March 12, 2013.  

Structural Reform and Economic Sustenance in European Austerity

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on January 25, 2013, Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank(ECB), said the bank’s program to buy the bonds of heavily indebted E.U. states had been “very helpful” in reducing the perception that the euro was on the verge of collapse. He also pointed to the structural reforms that heavily indebted states had enacted as “now bearing fruit.”[1] He urged those governments to continue to implement structural reforms so those states could take advantage of the ECB’s low interest rates and easy credit to banks. In short, the strategy of the ECB was to use monetary policy as leverage for long-term-oriented structural reforms at the state level. Political risk analysts listening to the central bank official likely came away with a more optimistic stance on the long term prospects for the E.U. economy.

Even though the progress achieved already on the debt crisis provided “light at the end of the tunnel,” the matter of structural reforms at the state level was subject to politics and was thus more uncertain. Also, economic conditions could worsen, hence making it politically and economically more difficult to make the needed structural changes. Chancellor Angela Merkel of the state of Germany warned the governors of heavily-indebted states such as Greece and Spain against the impulse to reduce the pace of structural reform in the face of economic stagnation. She pointed to the record unemployment numbers announced in Spain on January 24, 2013 as fodder for the anti-austerity political forces there. She further observed that “experience tells us that often pressure is required to enable structural reform.” The obstacles could have come from political officials or bureaucrats at the state level, and even from the people, upset at the economic austerity cut-backs hitting themselves and even the poor who depend on funding for sustenance. Advocates for those people were doubtlessly contesting that survival in the short run should not be sacrificed for long-term structural reform. 
Interestingly, making a qualitative (i.e., difference in kind) distinction between government programs that keep people alive on a daily basis and all the other budget items could actually permit more budget cutting because so much would be found to be subject to cuts without risking lives. In the U.S. at least, the qualitative difference has typically been made between domestic and military spending. This dichotomy has enabled huge increases to military programs even as cuts to food assistance have been proposed. Of course, the unemployment caused by a cancelled defense contract could put people in danger of losing their house or going without food. However, such individuals would be covered by the continuance of the programs providing sustenance as long as they were held apart from the other spending categories. Having an indirect effect on sustenance, such as military contracts can, does not render a particular budget item itself in the category of vital programs for sustenance, such as building more halfway houses for the mentally ill who are homeless.  This reflects the American culture more, wherein much more is deemed conditional than in Europe, where the principle of solidarity has been and is still more salient politically.
In short, long-term fiscal reform need not be at the expense of people eating and having shelter as well as medical care. Based on the firm foundation of human rights, programs primarily geared to sustenance can be isolated and protected such that the structural reform can be implemented more smoothly. Buffering sustenance programs from the massive cuts everywhere else would significantly reduce the vehemence of the protests and soothe the path of structural reform by isolating the entrenched officials and bureaucrats as the only primary obstructionists. 

See also Essays on the E.U. Political Economy, available at Amazon.  

1. “Davos: ECB’s Draghi Says ‘Real’ Economy Still Stagnant,” Deutsche Welle, January 25, 2013.

Greek Austerity: Pressure on the Environment

“While patrolling on a recent cold night, environmentalist Grigoris Gourdomichalis caught a young man illegally chopping down a tree on public land in the mountains above Athens. When confronted, the man broke down in tears, saying he was unemployed and needed the wood to warm the home he shares with his wife and four small children, because he could no longer afford heating oil. ‘It was a tough choice, but I decided just to let him go’ with the wood, said Mr. Gourdomichalis, head of the locally financed Environmental Association of Municipalities of Athens, which works to protect forests around Egaleo, a western suburb of the capital.”[1] Tens of thousands of trees had disappeared from parks and forests in Greece during the first half of the winter of 2013 alone as unemployed Greeks had to contend with the loss of the home heating-oil subsidy as part of the austerity program demanded by the state’s creditors. As impoverished residents too broke to pay for electricity or fuel turned to fireplaces and wood stoves for heat, smog was just one of the manifestations—the potential loss of forests being another. On Christmas Day, for example, pollution over Maroussi was more than two times the E.U.’s standard. Furthermore, many schools, especially in the north part of Greece, had to face hard choices for lack of money to heat classrooms.

Greek forests were succumbing  in 2012 to the Greeks' need to heat their homes as austerity hit.   source: Getty Images

Essentially, austerity was bringing many people back to pre-modern living, perhaps including a resurgence in vegetable gardens during the preceding summer. At least in respect to the wood, the problem was that the population was too big—and too concentrated in Athens—for the primitive ways to return, given the environment's capacity. 
To be sure, even in the Middle Ages, England had lost forests as the population (and royal plans) grew. In December 1953, many Londoners decided to use their fireplaces to burn wood, resulting in pollution blanketing the city. As a result, thousands died and the city outlawed the use of fireplaces. No one probably thought to ask whether the city had gotten too big—and too dense. No policy was enacted that would result in a shift in population out of the region.
Generally speaking, human population levels made possible by modern technology and medical advances have become too large for a return to pre-modern ways of life. Because of the extraordinarily large sizes of the modern city, including Athens, suddenly removing modern technology, which includes government subsidies, it is especially problematic when many people are forced to fend for themselves to meet basic needs. The efficiency of modern technology, including in regard to utilities and food distribution, is often taken for granted, even by governments, so the impacts on the environment when masses of people “return to nature” can be surprising. Nature has become "used to" seven billion humans on the planet in large part because we have economized via technology so the full brunt of the population-size is not felt. Particularly in industrial countries, societies are reliant on modern technology because without it the bulging population is unsustainable. 
Put another way, we have distanced ourselves from nature, and our growth in numbers in the meantime has made it impossible for us to “get back to nature” in a jolt, especially by many people. It is in this sense that governmental austerity programs that cut back on sustenance are dangerous not only for society, but also the ecosystems in which humans live. Accordingly, by mid-January, 2013, the Greek government was considering proposals to restore heating-oil subsidies. It is incredible that the financial interests of institutional creditors, including other governments, were even allowed to put the subsidies at risk.
In ethical terms, the basic sustenance of a people takes priority ethically over a creditor’s “need” for interest. The sin of usury is sourced back to the origins of lending as an instance of charity rather than money-making either from the plight of the poor or profit-uses.[2] When a person in antiquity was in trouble financially, someone with a bit of cash would lend some with the expectation that only that sum would be returned. The demand for interest on top was viewed by the historical Church as adding insult to injury (i.e., the bastardization of charity into a money-making ruse). Then exceptions were made for commercial lending, wherein a creditor could legitimately demand a share of the profit made from the borrowed money in addition to the return of the principal. As commercial lending came increasingly to characterize lending, the demand for interest became the norm, even on consumption loans when no profit would ensue to pay off the loan with interest. The notion that interest is conditional on a borrower having enough funds was lost, causing much pain to many in the name of fidelity of contract, as if it or the creditor’s financial interest were an absolute. Put another way, the default has swung over from the borrowers to the lenders to such an extent that society may look the other way as people literally have to cut down trees to heat their homes because creditors have demanded and won austerity touching on sustenance programs.
Therefore, especially in Christian Europe, putting people out by pressure being applied to state governments in the E.U. to make payments even in the context of a financial crisis can be considered to be untenable, ethically speaking. I am not suggesting that states should be profligate with borrowed funds. Rather, just as Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is bracketed by his Theory of Moral Sentiments, so too an economy (and financial system) functions best within moral constraints. 

1. Nektaria Stamouli and Stelios Bouras, “Greeks Raid Forests in Search of Wood to Heat Homes,” The New York Times, January 11, 2013.
2. Skip Worden, God's Gold, available at Amazon. 

“Fiscal Cliff” in U.S.: Real or Hyped?

As the U.S. economy slogged through a recession following the credit crisis in 2008 and the E.U. was weighed down by the ballast of austerity in the most indebted states, developing economies, including those of China and India, kept the world economy afloat. As a group, those economies grew 7.4% in 2010, 6.2% in 2011, and 5.5% in 2012. In keeping with this trend, the Global Economic Outlook of the Conference Board predicted 4.7% for 2013. Fortunately, the Board also predicted a pick-up in consumer demand in the U.S. to pick up the slack. “The only really short-term positive impact that we can have is that we can see a faster return of demand, particularly in the U.S.,” the Board’s chief economist said. As of 2012, such a return was not necessarily “in the cards.” The pessimism can be seen in the projected world economic growth of 3 percent, which is lower than the 3.2% expected in 2012 and the 3.8% achieved in 2011. That the projected growth rate of only 1.8% for the U.S. in 2013 is less than the projected 2.1% for 2012 indicates that increased demand in the U.S. was not expected to fully pick up the slack for the slowing-down of the developing economies. Here I want to point to a major factor in the U.S.: the possibly impending “fiscal cliff” of cuts in the federal budget and the end of the Bush tax breaks  that were scheduled to begin on January 1, 2013 unless Congress and the White House could come to a legislative agreement beforehand on an alternative way of holding down the deficits. Presumably that way would have a less recessionary effect.

In doing political risk analysis, one might be tempted to weigh in on predictions of a grand deal. I submit that predicting whether one comes together, as well as its differential economic impact would be, is not merely difficult, but also nearly impossible—unless one has “inside information” from the key players in Washington. Political risk analysis is not a sort of crystal-ball operation. Predicting the future is notoriously difficult for us mere mortals. However, we can assess how the prospect of a possible event, such as the “fiscal cliff,” is being played out in real-time. In other words, it is possible to determine whether the “fear-mongers” are exaggerating the probably economic impact (and why!). Assessing the severity of the worst-case scenario can thus be recalibrated, with implications for strategic planning.

Should the automatic cuts in the U.S. federal budget and end of the Bush tax cuts begin on January 1, 2013—a combined hit of over $500 million in that year alone—a “recessionary toll” was generally held to be the result. That is to say, the domestic demand made possible by increasing discretionary spending would be reduced as government spending decreases and federal income taxes increase. The Global Economic Outlook pointed to the prospect of Congressional and White House negotiations potentially obviating the sequestration as bearing on the global economic growth. Even though Congressional leaders could be counted on to rise to the occasion in delivering on sufficient dramatics at the last minute, the general public could not be sure that the denouement would involve a quick swerve away from “fiscal cliff” as though in some 1940s film noir.

Just by the numbers—around $500 million in 2013—the Conference Board may have been overstating the recessionary impact of the sequestration in an economy whose GDP was over $16 trillion. For one thing, the momentum in 2012 was in the direction of increasing demand. Also, corporate planning may have already “hedged their bets” so “going over the cliff” would not actually involve much change, at least initially, on their part.

I must add here the caveat that I not an economist. Hence, I do not have the quantitative expertise necessary to "run the numbers" on how much GNP would decline from the sequestration. However, I have run economic regressions, so I have some sense that the actual variables in a political economy are not as formulaic as those in a regression equation. The inherrent uncertainty in the political dimension in particular renders suspect the “empirical social science” approach of modern economics as determinative in political economy. Put another way, the political-risk-analysis dimension of an economic growth projection introduces considerable uncertainty in an otherwise quantitative economic numbers game, which might itself be overly deterministic or "exact." Even if we could untangle the myriad political factors going into political negotiations beforehand, we would still have to accept the uncertainty that is inherent in predicting the future, especially where human decisions are in the mix. That is to say, the future cannot be known for certain, given the respective natures of time and human beings.

I suspect the differential economic impact between a possible deal and sequestration was being exaggerated, particularly by the media but also by officials in government and CEOs—all of whom had subterranean reasons for doing so.  The media’s “fiscal cliff” label alone illustrates the proclivity to exaggerate. It is not as though a deal would have absolutely no drag on the economy, even if significantly less than that of sequestration. However, in distinguishing between “some” and “more” in terms of a drag on consumer demand in the U.S., the impact on the overall global economic output may be less than the “fiscal cliff” rhetoric implies because the world is much more than the American union. In other words, if the “differential” in terms of economic impact between a deal to cut the deficit and sequestration turns out to be less than portrayed in 2012, the resulting impact on the larger global economy would also be less.

In terms of a prognosis for 2013 from the vantage-point of late 2012, my best guess was that it would be largely similar to 2012 globally—the U.S. and E.U. continuing to climb out of deep recessions while struggling to inflict austerity on themselves for their own good, and the developing economies continuing to cooling their heels from growth rates that were probably unsustainable anyway. In terms of international business prospects, “continued languid” rather than “fiscal cliff” would be my headline. 

Source:

Matthew Walter, “U.S. Seen Propelling Growth of Global Economy in 2013,” The Wall Street Journal, November 13, 2012.

The Debt-Ceiling and the U.S. Budget as Ransom: A Structural Flaw of Democracy?

It is likely a drawback of democracy that hard decisions—that is, those in which fixing the problem goes against instant gratification or financial advantage—get pushed back, or “kicked down the road,” rather than addressed in a definitive way such that difficult problems are fixed. This structural problem can be seen in how Congressional leaders and the U.S. President delayed the “fiscal cliff” for two months at the beginning of 2013. More generally, the political tactic of holding the federal budget and the debt-ceiling as ransom evinces a fundamental flaw in democracy itself.

To be sure, excesses in politics were also in the mix, as each side stepped back from closing deals when presented with a more opportunistic bargaining standpoint in doing so. For example, President Obama suddenly added $400 billion more in revenue to his “grand bargain” with Speaker Boehner when the bipartisan “gang of six” in the U.S. Senate announced their own deal, which included more revenue than was in the “grand bargain.” Put another way, Obama got greedy and undercut his own credibility in terms of sticking to a deal that he had led the Speaker to believe had been achieved. Later, as conservative Republican pressure mounted on the Speaker, he walked away from even the “grand bargain” without the $400 billion more in revenue on the table. The result was frustration, distrust, and a “quick fix” that merely “kicked the can down the road” and unnerved markets with the prospect of ongoing uncertainty. At the very least, the trajectory bespoke the dysfunction rather than triumph of politics. More subtly, the verdict on representative democracy could not have been good. Although less transparent, this observation is far more serious, for no alternative to democracy could claim superiority even given the vulnerabilities in self-government.

Behind the leaders’ “inability” to reach a “grand bargain” capable of solving structural budgetary imbalances (beyond those which come from simply “digesting” the aging of the baby-boom) was pressure from competing ideologies on the size/role of government held within the electorate itself. Reconciling such distant ideologies can be difficult even in terms of reconciling visionary leadership;  deal-making is likely more oriented to a more micro level of policy.

The Speaker had been wise in wanting to do something much bigger in the “grand bargain” than merely getting the country’s debt ceiling raised and making a dent in the budget deficit. He had wanted fundamental tax and entitlements reform that would put the U.S. Government on the path to fiscal balance. “I did not come here to have a big title,” he said. “I came here to do big things.” Indeed, he put his title as Speaker at risk just by negotiating with the President with revenues on the table, given the emergence of the anti-tax “Tea-Party” Republicans in the House Republican caucus.

Upping the ante, as it were, was the choice made by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) to use the debt-ceiling vote as leverage to extract concessions from the White House. According to The New York Times, “Republicans vowed to use the need to raise the federal debt ceiling in early 2013 to force deeper spending reductions before agreeing to an extension until May.” Making passage of an increase in the ceiling in some sense contingent was itself destabilizing to the market due to the new uncertainty on whether the U.S. Government would default. Additional uncertainty in the business environment translates into a business reducing or putting off investments in expanding operations. The announcement itself added risk to U.S. Treasury bonds, even if the strategy would not actually go as far as actually standing by as the United States Treasury defaults on its obligations.

In reaction to Rep. Ryan’s announcement, Tim Geithner, Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, advised the President to make a deal because a default on Treasuries would trigger not only a significant downgrade in the nation’s debt rating, but also another Great Depression that would take generations to run its course. Even if Ryan’s negotiation strategy of “hold no prisoners” is very clever in a narrow sense of politics, it is difficult to accept the “ends justifies the means” justification for even opening up the mere possibility of another Great Depression. In other words, even great political strategy can raise red flags if the country itself is put at catastrophic economic risk even for a time. It makes sense that the American Founders viewed partisanship so negatively, even if the Federalists and Anti-federalists could be as partisan as they come. Being willing to up the ante without limit in terms of the risk of harm to the whole may be part of an escalation of ideological passion that eclipses common sense and eventually sinks the entire ship. An observer from Mars might get the idea that the humans over here are getting more desperate. Given the sheer ideological distance between the competing visions at issue, using something as catastrophic as not raising the debt ceiling as leverage can reasonably be regarded as reckless, if not foolish, even if the political calculus is cleaver and even ultimately effective in terms of the ideological objectives.

Fortunately (relative to having the debt-ceiling as leverage), the minority leader and the president of the U.S. Senate came up with a “fiscal cliff” to effectively replace the debt-ceiling as leverage. Even though legislative patrons of various parts of the federal budget claimed that the across-the-board cuts, or sequestration, would devastate the particular departments or programs, “going over” the “fiscal cliff” would be preferable to even risking the U.S. going into default. In other words, the move to something less catastrophic in what a partisan is threatening if he doesn’t get what he wants represents a ray of sanity in an otherwise insane escalation in systemic risk.

To be sure, the media had made sequestration sound like the U.S. Government would be paralyzed and the sky would fall. The economic fear and uncertainty unleashed by the hyperbolic rhetoric are perhaps more harmful than the actual “cuts” would be. The across-the-board “cuts” scheduled to go into effect on March 2, 2013 absent a deficit-reduction law in the meantime total $85 billion. This is a mere sliver in a budget of more than $3.5 trillion. Indeed, the “cuts” are less  in total than the last annual increase in the budget—far from likely to send the U.S. economy into recession.

According to the Fiscal Year 2012 Mid-Session Review, the enacted 2011 budget called for $3.63 trillion in outlays. The enacted 2012 budget called for $3.796 trillion in outlays, according to the Office of Management and Budget. The annual increase, $166 billion, is almost twice as much as the $85 billion at issue in the threatened sequester for March through December 2013. Put another way, the sequester’s cuts for 2013 beginning on March 2^nd equal about half of the increase in the budget from FY2011 to FY2012.

The reckless nature of the sequestration is not in taking back half of the last annual increase. In fact, the total amount of outlays would still steadily increase throughout the ten year period that is subject to sequestration.

Rather, the craziness pertains to two points. First, although the $85 billion is less than half of the prior year’s increase in the budget, the sequestered amount would not apply, according to the Congressional Budget Office, to about 70% of mandatory spending. That mandatory spending, such as social security, medicare and Medicaid, made up about two-thirds of the budget at the time. It follows that sequestration would not touch 47% of the federal budget. This means that for the remaining 53 percent, the reduction would go deeper than the increases in those categories, or “buckets,” from the prior year. In other words, about half of the budget would take on the full weight of the sequester, hence the “cuts” there really would be cuts (i.e., going beyond removing the increase from the prior year). Reports of suspended public services, such as air traffic control at some 100 smaller airports, could thus be expected even though in total the sequester amount is about half of the total budget increase from the prior year.

It would be like adding an additional product to an already-loaded caravan of camels crossing a desert. The caravan could easily absorb the addition, except that the decision is made to put the additional weight onto about half of the camels. From the strain on those camels, an observer might easily conclude that the additional product is too much for the caravan itself. Any question of adding still another product would be dismissed out of hand even though the further addition is feasible and would make the caravan profitable.

Second, each “budgetary bucket” in the 53% of the federal budget subject to the sequestration would face the same percentage or “automatic” reduction, regardless of how vital the particular bucket happens to be. A department could not shift its “cuts” from payroll, for example, to conferences, to avoid layoffs. Put another way, all of the buckets in a given department would have be treated the same way in the sequestration (i.e., automatic, across-the-board). As a result, even just $85 billion out of $3.5 trillion could result in significant layoffs.

From the standpoint of achieving fiscal balance, it could be argued that even more should be cut, or some additional combination of additional revenue and “cuts” going beyond a total amount that merely removes about half of the annual increase in the budget from the prior year.  However, this point would doubtless pale in comparison with the real cuts to the budget buckets subject to sequestration. The way the sequestration is designed implies or gives rise to a perception of severity that is not the case on the macro level, and this perception can arrest any movement to bring spending and revenue further into line. Put another way, the way the sequestration approaches the federal budget makes it more difficult to bring enough political will to “finishing the job” in ending structural deficits and not merely narrowing them.

In conclusion, using the debt-ceiling and sequestration as leverage are not really comparable from the standpoint of actual (rather than media-hyped) harm to the United States. The harm from sequestration applies only to certain “buckets”; the overall “hit” being merely taking back some of the increase from the prior year’s budget. In contrast, the failure to increase the debt-ceiling to the extent that Treasury can avoid default gives rise to the systemic harm of a governmental default. Perceptions notwithstanding, the particular harms from the sequestration are qualitatively and quantitatively different. Accordingly, the move from the debt-ceiling to sequestration as political leverage represents a bright spot on what otherwise looks like democracy being utterly incapable of tackling fundamental problems facing a republic. To be sure, the obsessive fixation on “revenue vs. cuts” contributes to the limited perspective that prevents more fundamental solutions from entering even into public deliberation and discourse. Generally speaking, we the people are holding ourselves back even from being aware of more far-reaching proposals because of the distortions in the media’s “reporting” (or opining) as well as in the design of the sequestration itself. The fundamental question is whether such “holding back” is intrinsic to self-governance of and by the People.

Source:

“Cliffhanger,” Frontline, PBS, February 11, 2013.

Cavuto, Neil “Sequestration Really the End of the World?” Fox News. 20 February 2013.