The Ancien Regime of the Good Old USA

OK I admit it.  When I read Jacob Aronson’s article Conserving and Consolidating the Progressive Liberal Tradition in TCSDaily, I blew a gasket.  Writes Aronson:

One of the core challenges now facing the Party is the collapse of the New Deal coalition and adaptation to the underlying economic realities that brought it about. Bill Clinton’s rallying cry to "end government as we know it" was an attempt to reform government along private sector lines.

Well, yeah!  But since then the Democratic Party has turned away from Bill Clinton’s attempt to reform it.  It is now driven partly by street brawlers like Markos Moulitsas who want to make the Democrats into a fighting party again, fighting the big corporations that are now more powerful than governments, and partly by the new progressives like Jacob Aronson.

But “reforming government along private sector lines” or using it to fight for the people against the powerful, as Al Gore wanted to do back in 2000, is delusional.  Let us look at government in the United States.  Let us follow the money in this unified table of government spending in the United States in 2004.  It is obtained by combining two spreadsheets, one from the US Census Bureau on state and local government spending, and one from the President’ s budget documents.

Here is the top line result for 2004:

• Programs for seniors: $1 trillion
• Programs for youth: $700 billion
• Programs for defense: $700 billion
• Programs for the poor: $660 billion
• Programs for transportation: $175 billion
• Interest on the debt: $400 billion
• All other programs: $2 trillion

Now it seems to me that the great power, the great interests in the land, the folks for whom we work at our jobs and for whom we pour the most money through our government is: senior pensions and health care, education of children, defense against enemies foreign and domestic, relief of the poor, and transportation.

And this is a huge commitment.  In fact, it is a commitment that can’t be met.

That is what politics is going to be about in this century.  It is a sideshow to talk about management along private sector lines, or using government to punish corporations. 

The question is: how long can we go on like this?