With the U.S. national debt sitting at $37 trillion, it’s hard to imagine a time when Congress argued for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. Remember when Republicans had a reputation for fiscal conservatism?
According to the non-partisan CBO, President Trump’s big beautiful bill will add another $3.3 trillion in debt over the next decade. At the same time, the bill cuts health care to poor people. This from the New York Times:
G.O.P. Bill Has $1.1 Trillion in Health Cuts and 11.8 Million Losing Care, C.B.O. Says
Analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that Republicans’ new version of the legislation would make far deeper cuts and lead to more people becoming uninsured than previous proposals.
Who needs health insurance, am I right?
Yearly interest on the national debt is now higher than the Pentagon budget, which is truly saying (and spending) a lot.
Where is all the money going? Leaving aside the cost of servicing the national debt, most of discretionary spending goes to the Pentagon, Homeland Security, and similar forces of aggression and repression. New nuclear weapons, for example, may cost $2 trillion over the next 30 years. A misnamed “golden dome” (leaky sieve is more accurate) allegedly to protect America against nuclear missile attacks may cost $500 billion or more over the next decade or two. And nothing costs as much as foreign wars, as we learned from the disastrous Iraq and Afghan Wars, which may end up adding $8 trillion to the national debt when all the bills come due.
While achieving a balanced budget isn’t easy, there are two easy ways to come closer:
Tax the rich.
Stop making war, downsize the empire, and focus the U.S. military on national defense and defense alone.
Option (1) is out since the rich own the government. (Welcome to Plutocracy USA.) Option (2) is also out since the military-industrial-congressional complex is the fourth branch of government and arguably the most powerful. All presidents appease it, whether their names are Bush or Biden, Obama or Trump.
So, Congress and the President do what they always do: Serve the rich and kowtow to the MICC, the National (In)Security State. Any “balancing” to be done with the federal budget will be done on the tired backs of the poor and disadvantaged. They have no lobbies, no money, no say.
Can the working classes pull America up by their collective bootstraps? America’s workers have achieved miracles before, but this is too big of an ask even for them.
Yemen, Israel, Ukraine, and the U.S. Embrace of War Everywhere
Last night, the U.S. bombed another country, Yemen, in the name of the “rules-based order.” Yemen has been striking shipping as a form of protest against the ongoing Israeli genocide-in-slow-motion in Gaza. It always looks good when the U.S. uses its military to enable mass murder elsewhere. I’m sure the “peace bombs” we dropped will bring stability to the region.
The U.S. military bombs and launches Tomahawk missiles as its answer to everything. Meanwhile, our dynamic commander in chief, Joe Biden, launched a new front in this war of terror without Congressional authorization, an impeachable offense. But of course most in Congress will salute him for taking “decisive” action by bombing yet another poor country with brown-skinned Muslim people living in it. Perhaps Biden is counting on being a “wartime president” as a way to eke out a narrow victory in November.
In Gaza, incremental genocide continues with at least 23,000 Palestinians dead and another 60,000 wounded, the majority being women and children. The Israeli government is poisoning the land and water of Gaza, blasting buildings into rubble, and starving the Palestinians while still claiming to be the victims of the war. Antony Blinken, America’s diplomat-in-chief, says the war will end when Hamas offers its unconditional surrender. After which, what, exactly? Israel will rebuild Gaza and embrace Palestinians as brothers and sisters?
Israel is going to rebuild all this for the Palestinians in Gaza?
In Ukraine, the war continues to be stalemated as Ukraine waits for another $65 billion or so in aid from the Biden administration. Which brings me to this story from The Boston Globe this morning:
More than $1 billion worth of shoulder-fired missiles, drones, and night-vision goggles that the United States has sent to Ukraine have not been properly tracked by US officials, a new Pentagon report concluded, raising concerns they could be stolen or smuggled at a time when Congress is debating whether to send more military aid to Ukraine.
Over the last two years, the U.S. has flooded Ukraine with weaponry, producing a stalemated war and a healthy black market in stolen arms. The next step should be obvious: persist in the same folly by sending Ukraine even more weapons. Again, the argument is made that it’s all Russia’s fault and that, if Putin wants the war to end, he should basically surrender by withdrawing all Russian troops from the territory he has seized.
There you have it. The annihilation of Gaza will stop when Hamas totally surrenders and the war in Ukraine will stop when Russia totally surrenders, otherwise the U.S. must keep sending more than $100 billion in weaponry and aid to the “democracies” of Israel and Ukraine in their righteous battles against evil. Yes, that really is the position of Biden and Blinken.
Finally, a reader sent along this important article on how the U.S. is funding these wars and in fact the entire war on terror: by deficit spending. Call it “the ghost budget.” America’s national debt has ballooned to $34 trillion mainly due to the disastrous war on terror (roughly $8 trillion), colossal Pentagon budgets, and gargantuan bailouts of banks and corporations due to financial and Covid crises, real or constructed. Vast wealth continues to flow upwards in America as Biden’s “everyday people” struggle. Whether for Biden or Trump, the answer to the debt is always more tax breaks for the rich in the name of “stimulating” growth. Those tax breaks, of course, only drive the national debt up further, but never mind that.
What’s coming is a concerted attack on social security and Medicare/Medicaid in the name of fiscal responsibility. As the comedian George Carlin predicted: They’re coming for your social security. And they’ll get it, he added. Which is consistent with what Joe Biden has said in the past about the need to cut social security as well as health and veterans’ benefits.
Uncle Sam: No stranger to imperialism (from the Spanish-American War of 1898)
W.J. Astore
Why do empires fall? Sometimes, it’s easy to identify a cause. Whether led by the Kaiser or by Hitler, Germany’s Second and Third Empires were destroyed by world wars. Germany’s ambition was simply too great, its militarism too dominant, its policies too harsh to win long-term converts, its leaders too blinded by the pursuit of power, its enemies too many to conquer or otherwise neutralize.
Other imperial falls are more complex. What caused Rome’s fall? (Leaving aside the eastern part of the empire, which persisted far longer as the Byzantine Empire.) Barbarians and their invasions, say some. The enervating message and spirit of Christianity, said the historian Edward Gibbon. Rome’s own corruption and tyranny, say others. Even lead in Roman water pipes has been suggested as a contributing cause to Rome’s decline and fall. Taking a longer view, some point to the rise of Islam in the 7th century and its rapid expansion into previously Roman territories as the event that administered the final coup de grâce to a dying empire.
America’s empire, it is clear, is now in decline, and a key reason is imperial overstretch as manifested by endless wars and overspending on the military (with literally trillions of dollars being thrown away on fruitless wars). An especially fine summary is Alfred McCoy’s article this week at TomDispatch.com. As McCoy notes:
In effect, the president and his team, distracted by visions of shimmering ships and shiny planes (with their predictable staggering future cost overruns), are ready to ditch the basics of global dominion: the relentless scientific research that has long been the cutting edge of U.S. military supremacy. And by expanding the Pentagon while slashing the State Department, Trump is also destabilizing that delicate duality of U.S. power by skewing foreign policy ever more toward costly military solutions (that have proved anything but actual solutions) …
In just one extraordinary year, Trump has destabilized the delicate duality that has long been the foundation for U.S. foreign policy: favoring war over diplomacy, the Pentagon over the State Department, and narrow national interest over international leadership. But in a globalizing world interconnected by trade, the Internet, and the rapid proliferation of nuclear-armed missiles, walls won’t work. There can be no Fortress America.
In this passage, McCoy stresses the damage being done by the Trump administration. But Trump is just the culmination of certain trends, e.g. favoring the Pentagon over the State Department is nothing new, as I wrote about here in 2010. And America has been in love with shimmering ships and shiny planes for generations, with several administrations supporting the F-35 jet fighter, a program that may end up costing as much as $1.4 trillion. Plenty of money for weapons that kill; not so much for medicines that cure: that’s imperial America in a nutshell.
I would stress that America’s strength overseas was (and is) always based on its strength at home in areas such as science, education, infrastructure, medicine, manufacturing, and exports. But what we’ve witnessed over the last 40 years is an immense and wasteful “investment” in wars and weapons even as our country itself has hollowed out. Science is now marked by the denial of facts (such as global warming). Education is all about students as consumers, with an overall decline in standards and performance. Infrastructure is crumbling. Medicine is too expensive and America’s overall health and life expectancy are both in decline. Manufacturing and exports have withered (except for the production and export of weapons, naturally).
As a result of all this, America is running a national debt of roughly 20 trillion dollars. The future is being sacrificed for the present, a tragic reality reflected in the latest Republican tax cut, which benefits the richest Americans the most, along with big corporations, and which will likely add another trillion to the national debt.
In short, America’s foreign decline is mirrored (and driven) by its domestic decline as reflected by its choices. Looking at the USA today, you get the sense it’s the best of times for the richest few, and the worst of times for so many Americans struggling with health care debt, student loan debt, and the uncertainty of low-wage jobs that could be outsourced at any moment. At the same time, the American political scene is driven by fear: of immigrants, of a nuclear war with North Korea, of Russian meddling (real or imagined), of growing Chinese power, and of the perpetually-hyped threat of terrorist attacks on “the Homeland.”
Empires can fall very quickly, as the “thousand-year” Third Reich did, or they can fall ever so slowly, as the Roman Empire did. But fall they do. What is in the cards for the United States? Readers, fire away in the comments section.
Update (1/20/18): Secretary of Defense James Mattis now claims that China and Russia represent bigger threats than terrorism, along with Congress itself since it can’t pass an extended budget for the Pentagon. He also claimed the U.S. military’s “competitive edge” is eroding in “every domain of warfare,” despite a defense budget of $700 billion.
None of this is a surprise. Indeed, this is exactly what happens when you put a retired general and known war hawk in charge of the defense department. Generals will always want more: more troops, more money, more resources, more authority. And to support their demands, they will always find more enemies as well.
Bracing Views 