It has always been my personal view that as long as the American federal budget was balanced – with peacetime spending covered by tax and fee income – I could be magnificently tolerant about the money being spent on things I didn’t like. That, I told myself, was the nature of democracy. I might not like National Public Radio or tax money funding abortions, but that’s the nature of public affairs – other people liked what I didn’t, but those people had to hold their noses and pay for what I liked.
The key was a balanced budget, with a minimum of borrowing to cover current expenses. I felt that borrowing was for investment in permanent construction, not current expense. During the First and Second World Wars, the U.S. government financed military expenditure largely through the purchase of War Bonds under various names – Liberty Loans, War Bonds, War Savings Stamps. When the Japanese surrendered in the summer of 1945, America’s national debt was 126% of gross domestic product, and all that debt was held by American citizens, adult and children (I was a grade schooler during the Second World War, and I remember buying War Savings Stamps for 10c once a week in class). The amounts of U.S. bonds held by foreigners during those wars was so small as to be meaningless.
The new generation of the politically powerful has abandoned the fiscal principles that I grew up with, summarized above. During the first administration of George W. Bush (the younger, who I consider as unqualified, as ineffective and as incompetent as his successor, Barack H. Obama), the guiding minds of the Republican Party came up with a new strategy to enrich and empower themselves: scrap the balanced budget concept, and rely on borrowing to provide federal revenues. The tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 weren’t enough for them; they wanted more for themselves, and when they saw that abandoning the balanced budget freed them from the responsibility for the consequences of their actions, they couldn’t get it into place fast enough.
President Obama has followed the Republican lead in relying on borrowing rather than taxation; borrowing enables the great mass of Americans to avoid responsibility for paying for the level of government they want – it enables that great mass of Americans to engage in adolescent irresponsibility, by proving the truth of the old adage – “socialism works fine as long as you have an unlimited amount of other people’s money to spend”. Millions of Americans want free money that they didn’t earn and will never have to repay, and they don’t care where it comes from. In the Roman Empire, they called that “bread and circuses”. It worked just fine for the lower classes, until the last years of the fifth century A.D., when the Empire collapsed under the strain of insupportable deficits.
Republicans love to criticize President Obama for not sending annual budgets to the House of Representatives, but they forget that he’s only following the Republican example: flying by the seat of your pants is nothing but adolescent irresponsibility, admitting that you don’t have the mature intellectual ability or equipment to think seriously about the future, that you only want to deal with the necessity of the moment. In other words, it’s better to be a child than an adult, because children can’t be held responsible for the consequences of their actions. The President and the members of Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, act as if they were children, and leave the adult actions to “professional” administrators.
Another advantage of responding to the necessity of the moment is that you and your cronies can take advantage of the opportunity of the moment. There is no standard of behavior that you can be held to, such as a budget plan, which is an objective criterion for expenditure. A budget permits the expended amount to be compared with the budgeted amount, and praise or blame can be handed out according to whether the budgeted amount was exceeded or not. If there’s no budget plan in place, no comparison is possible.
There’s no upside for either political party in having a budget plan in place, because enrichment is easier if there are no objective criterion. The “inside” game is enrichment and empowerment for both political parties, and as long as that game can continued, don’t expect meaningful change.

Copyright 2013 by Caballa Family Enterprises, 2000 City of San Fernando Pampanga, Philippines
Contact email address: “davidlaibow1215[at]yahoo.com”
Re-Posted May 21, 2013