US politicians are engaged in passionate debate and confrontation over the debt limit and spending. The question is whether to “cut” two trillion over the next ten years, which is to say, about two hundred billion dollars a year, which is to say, whether, after ten years, spending will be five or six trillion dollars a year more than it is now, or whether it will be five or six trillion dollars a year more than it is now, assuming that the US government still exists in ten years.
Politics, they say, is the art of the possible, though others say it is war by less lethal means. And if politics is the art of the possible, one must proceed with small incremental changes. So if every year we have another teensy weeny confrontation like this one over teensy weeny little issues, and every year we cut another two trillion over ten years, which is to say, two hundred billion per year, then, at the end of ten years, instead of federal spending having grown by five or six trillion per year, it will have grown by three or four trillion per year, assuming we win every such confrontation, which we will not.
Spending increases are irreversible. No one ever proposes actual cuts, merely increases less than planned. Government departments are immortal, all of which follows from the fact that bureaucrats are unsackable. Even if they completely piss of the president and congress, and demonstrate total incompetence combined with gross insubordination, as the SEC did over Ponzi schemes, they are still completely fireproof. And there is always a good reason for yet another government department, for if a government department screws up spectacularly, as they so regularly do, the remedy is always the creation yet another government department, rather than the disappearance of the old.
Wisconsin, one state in fifty states, is the extraordinary exception, the one state where the elected politicians rolled the permanent fireproof government, or at least made a serious attempt to do so. They may well fail, but the results so far are interesting.
Reagan attempted to defund the left, and failed.
In Wisconsin they actually are defunding the left, hence the extraordinary reaction. The savings accomplished were dramatic, revealing how much of government spending was in reality funding for the left – which in turn reveals that the left is 99% astroturf, that leftists are on the payroll.
To actually accomplish anything, it would be necessary to defund the left nationwide, and to make government employees fireable nationwide, which would not be politics as normal, not be incremental change, but be difficult to accomplish by means short of regime change.
The left is currently defined by its policies on race and sex, rather than class. In the US, this is a natural consequence of the legacy of slavery and the mass importation of voters from Mexico. In Europe, it is rather an artificial consequence of the European left taking its marching orders from the US left, resulting in a policy of transforming Europe into an Islamic state, a condition even less pleasant than turning California into Mexico.
However, the American left position on race and sex today is as indefensible as its position on socialism was in 1949. The strategy of handing out a middle class lifestyle on the basis of race and sex led to economic crisis and collapse.
If the left, which is to say the state, stops giving people a middle class lifestyle on the basis of race and sex, then people who have middle class jobs on the basis of race and sex, as for example most of your human resources department, expose the scam by not living a middle class lifestyle, whereupon is becomes embarrassing to give them middle class jobs on the basis of race and sex.
If the left, which is to say the state, stops giving people middle class jobs on the basis of race and sex, then people who have degrees on the basis of race and sex expose the scam by their inability to get jobs, whereupon it becomes embarrassing to give them middle class degrees on the basis of race and sex.
If the left, which is to say the state, stops giving people middle class degrees on the basis of race and sex, then Marie Curie and company are left high and dry.
As the left runs into troubles with its position on class and race and sex, it increasingly becomes purely the party of the state. The trade unions are state trade unions, the race baiters are government and party employees.
At the same time as leftist ideology becomes more more fake and bankrupt, the rate of movement leftwards becomes faster and faster, foreshadowing a political singularity.
I attempted to fit the growth in regulation and the growth in expenditure with best fit to simple power law rules. The functions contained a term sqrt(T-t), or 1/sqrt(T-t), where t is the date, and T is around 2016-2027.
The fit was not nearly good enough to give a very definite date, but the basic scenario is a regulatory singularity: For example:
- 1933: 17 pages Glass–Steagall Act
- 1999: 385 pages Gramm–Leach–Bliley Bill, also known as the Financial Services Modernization Act
- 2010: 2305 pages Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act
The fit was not all that good, but most hyperexponential curves have a singularity coming up soon once you get to the part of the curve that is obviously hyperexponential.
Although pensions are a disaster in the long term, what is driving the deficit in the short term is explosive growth of regulation: for example the financial services act replaced sound lending with politically correct lending, which in turn resulted in bailouts. The growth in regulation also prevents investment in the sense that any investment requires an ever growing pile of permits that are ever more difficult to obtain. This produces an imbalance between savings and investment, which needs to be remedied, and Keynesians believe should be remedied by government dis-saving.
With great power comes great friction, which causes great turbulence.
That, plus legislation is pretty granular, as such things go.
I’d be interested by the actual graphs.