Unsustainable but untouchable

Mark Steyn on the trouble we're in:

National Review’s Jim Geraghty sums up Obama’s America thus: “Unsustainable is the new normal.” Indeed. The other day, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, described current deficits as “unsustainable.” So let’s make them even more so. The president tells us, with a straight face, that his grossly irresponsible profligate wastrel of a predecessor took the federal budget on an eight-year joyride, so the only way his sober, fiscally prudent successor can get things under control is to grab the throttle and crank it up to what Mel Brooks in Spaceballs (which seems the appropriate comparison) called “Ludicrous Speed.”

Obama’s spending proposes to take the average Bush deficit for the years 2001–2008, and double it, all the way to 2020. To get out of the Bush hole, we need to dig a hole twice as deep for one-and-a-half times as long. And that’s according to the official projections of his Economics Czar, Ms. Rose Colored-Glasses. By 2015, the actual hole may be so deep that even if you toss every Obama speech down it on double-spaced paper you still won’t be able to fill it up. In the spendthrift Bush days, federal spending as a proportion of GDP average 19.6 percent. Obama proposes to crank it up to 25 percent as a permanent feature of life.

But, if they’re “unsustainable,” what happens when they can no longer be sustained? A failure of bond auctions? A downgraded government debt rating? Reduced GDP growth? Total societal collapse? Mad Max on the New Jersey Turnpike?

We are in serious trouble and if Americans don't know it, they certainly sense it. From Tim Rutten's The Winter of America's Discontent:

A national Washington Post/ABC News poll found that just 24% of Americans, fewer than 1 in 4, trust congressional Republicans, like Shelby, "to make the right decisions for the country's future." (Wonder why?) The House and Senate Democrats didn't fare all that better, and are trusted by just 32%. Forty-seven percent of those polled -- still less than half -- have confidence in Obama's ability to make the right decisions.

When people's mistrust of their elected officials and the parties reaches these levels, there is little for political leaders to do but take counsel from their own anger and anxieties -- and, these days, the popular mood fairly seethes with both those things. Discontent with the present and apprehension about the future have become the background noise of our politics, yet both sides of the congressional aisle seem deaf to the din.

In one of his magisterial explorations of German politics between the wars, the historian Ian Kershaw mused that "there are times -- they mark the danger point for a political system -- when politicians can no longer communicate, when they stop understanding the language of the people they are supposed to be representing."

This was made obvious by the uncomprehending and even hostile attitudes displayed by so many of our "representatives" toward their own constituents at the town meetings of August '09. And it has been underscored by the ram-it-down-their-throats tactics practiced by Congress and still advocated by the president, who attributes the unpopularity of his agenda to our inability to grasp its wisdom.

We may desire representatives who deign to listen to us and can be induced to serve our interests, but what we want more than that are candidates and public servants who are actually of us (as in government of the people), who know and share our concerns and values because they live in our world. That basic desire, to be represented by someone who is representative of us, runs deep beneath the cynicism of many Americans. That's why politicians try so hard to fake their man-of-the-people image, and why we're all agog when we perceive the rare "authentic" politician. What an indictment of the norm, frauds and elites being so much the usual thing that a man or woman who appears to be one of us -- She shops at Walmart! He drives a truck! -- strikes us as something of a miracle.

Mr. Elmendorf warns of the consequences of continued hemorrhagic government spending:

“I think most observers expect that the government will act, that the unsustainability will be resolved through action, not through witnessing some collapse down the road,” he said. “If literally nothing is done, then eventually something very, very bad happens. But I think the widespread view is that you and your colleagues will take action.”

We don't think so. Or as Steyn puts it, "Dream on, you kinky fantasist." The government acts, all right, by spending more. (Visual aid here.)

Maybe this is what the tea party movement is all about: a visceral recognition that our government just plain does not represent us, and an urgent need to intervene before the very, very bad thing happens.

But the cultural shift that would need to take place in order to pull back from the precipice may be beyond what even tea-partying small-government advocates have in mind. In other words, it may be too late for good leaders to save our economy. The entitlement monster is just too big. John Hinderaker:

I think, on the contrary, that it is unlikely that Congress will take effective action--as opposed to seeking political cover--before grave damage has been done. In his written testimony, Elmendorf implicitly explained why:

The country faces a fundamental disconnect between the services that people expect the government to provide, particularly in the form of benefits for older Americans, and the tax revenues that people are prepared to send to the government to finance those services. That fundamental disconnect will have to be addressed in some way if the nation is to avoid serious long-term damage to the economy and to the well-being of the population.

We need deep and fundamental cuts in federal spending, which means, above all, Medicare and Social Security, because that's where the money is. The whole concept of an "entitlement" was a mistake--really, a disaster--that must be repudiated. But for the foreseeable future, there will be no political will to make such changes. So we're going to see a race between political will and economic collapse. It's hard to be optimistic about the outcome unless a drastic change in our political culture takes place, soon.

Yes. But Obama's spending mania and attempt to make us all entitled via a takeover of the healthcare system have so highlighted the entitlement problem that we are at least talking about it. So maybe there's a little bit of water in the glass?

Follow-up: George Will on Ryan's Roadmap
(Thanks to Mr. Will for his column which he might have called "Paul Ryan's Roadmap for Dummies.")

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