Both parties have learned that, by luxuriating in polarisation, they can ignore that governing requires trust and compromise. Republicans can have their tax cuts, Democrats can have their spending, and they can blame each other for the debt
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitask, dooming America’s credit and stunting its growth. Even Thomas Jefferson, that scourge of big government, saw the problem. While serving as minister to France he wrote to James Madison in 1788 that America had to prove it could be trusted to pay its debts. “The existence of a nation, having no credit, is always precarious,” he wrote.
Alexander Hamilton then persuaded him to go further. As the first Treasury secretary, Hamilton urged consolidating the debts of individual states and imposing new tariffs to pay them off. America’s debt “was the price of liberty,” he told Congress in 1790, and sound national credit would swell “the individual and aggregate prosperity of the citizens”.
These episodic standoffs are revelatory also because they expose an underlying erosion of governance. The Republicans who are stamping their feet have a point. The budget process, if called to account for the meaning of either word, makes a mockery of both. While over the years the branches of government traded authority over budgeting, someone was always taking it seriously. This century, that has changed, as the debt-to-ratio has almost tripled, to 98%.
It may be cause for hope that the two periods of seriousness about budgeting in the past 30 years occurred when a Democratic president faced a Republican House: under Mr Obama and under Bill Clinton. Lexington, dewy-eyed, was at the White House in 1998 when Mr Clinton announced the budget would soon balance, for the first time since 1969. His aides forecast “surpluses as far as the eye can see”.It is hard not to mourn the America that might have been, had George W.
As Hamilton told Congress, “States, like individuals, who observe their engagements, are respected and trusted: while the reverse is the fate of those, who pursue an opposite conduct.” Whether or not extremists or bumblers breach the debt ceiling this time, America’s lawmakers are not heeding his warning.
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