President Coyote

By Crispin Sartwell

 

If, as the saying goes, the power to tax is the power to destroy, the power to borrow is the power to be destroyed.  If taxation is homicide, deficit spending is suicide.

     According to the Constitution, both the power of the federal government to tax and the power of the federal government to borrow are essentially unlimited. Many of the American statesmen who opposed the ratification of the document thought that these powers could be used to create a despotism of the kind that patriots had resisted in the Revolution, which was, as much as anything, a tax revolt.

    They had a point, and both the extent to which Americans are taxed and the extent to which they are regulated under the auspices of their own dollars has crept steadily upward for the whole history of the republic.

    Nevertheless at any given moment there are practical limits to increased taxation, fixed by the punishment voters inflict on politicians who raise their taxes. Many an American politician - Walter Mondale and George H.W. Bush spring to mind - have learned this fact at the price of their careers.

    But there are, as yet, no practical limits to increased borrowing, and about the only anti-debt movement with any bite in recent American history was the candidacy of Ross Perot.

    The Bush administration has taken deficit spending to almost comical lengths. Like Wile E. Coyote, it happily creates incredibly elaborate mechanisms that will result only in its own destruction.

    The administration flatly intends to borrow $200 billion - to start with - to address hurricane Katrina, while showing no tendency to raise any actual money for Iraq or for ever-increasing (and stunningly inept) "homeland security" programs.

    It's hard not to be amazed by the new American conservatism: big-government conservatism, enthusiastic about every possible application of state power to every possible problem, indeed manufacturing problems so as to be able to throw untold billions of dollars at them. It's a good thing for the Republican party that Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan are dead.

    Throw in some fresh, fairly unavoidable war somewhere, or some new dimension of terrorism, or the next natural disaster, and DC will look like New Orleans, drowning in debt. The dollar will tank.  The service on the debt will become unpayable. The economy will nosedive.

    One almost wishes for this result, because the only way to teach politicians anything is to have them lose landslide elections.

    In fact, until deficit becomes disaster, politicians will believe that they can borrow infinitely. And evidently, until deficit becomes disaster, American voters don't care about it at all.

    This dynamic, which amounts to a perverse incentive to continuously reduce the government's income while continuously inflating its debt, is a fundamental weakness in our form of government. The Constitution, which simply allows the federal government "to borrow Money on the credit of the United States," should be amended.

   Many have proposed a balanced budget amendment of the sort found in several state constitutions. I personally would favor the approach that J. Bracken Lee - a former governor of Utah - suggested in the 1950s: a resolution that would dissolve the federal government if the national debt ever reached $6 trillion. The debt is currently about $8 trillion dollars, and is about to balloon.

     Then again, I'm an anarchist and I'd like to see the federal government dissolved no matter what the amount of the debt. So perhaps people more reasonable than I am could devise some sort of responsible constitutional limits on the power to borrow.

    This would be directly in keeping with the spirit of the framers, because the inability of the national government to pay its Revolutionary War debt was the impetus for the constitutional convention of 1787.  Strangely enough, the founders of the United States were ashamed of this debt and wanted to repay it.

    There might be an amendment to limit deficit spending as a percentage of overall spending in any given year, for example. And though contemporary American politicians of both parties might not really be enthusiastic about such an amendment, they might not be able to oppose it with a straight face.

    One thing about Wile E. Coyote: no matter how many times he tumbles off into the abyss, he never draws any lessons from his experience: he retains his sunny, pathetically diabolical optimism. It would be nice to think that these pathetically diabolical neo-conservatives are smarter than cartoon characters.

    Meanwhile, they're loading the anvil on one side of the seesaw and getting ready to jump on the other side.