The 100th day of a new administration is always considered symbolic, a time for assessment and retrospection. Today, Trump’s 100th day, and by extension the 100th day of the current incarnation of one-party governance, it’s worth noting that, once again, in Lucy vs Charlie Brown fashion, the voters are being let down by the politicians they picked to replace those that let them down the last time around.
Already, many campaign pledges, both from the President and from the GOP at large, have been walked back or shunted aside. Already, politicians and politics seem to have fallen back into the usual rhythm, albeit more “shrill” and overtly partisan than the previous iteration (which, itself, seemed more shrill and partisan than it predecessor). And, already, the party that’s not in power is tallying up the promises it’ll make and subsequently break in order to get back in power.
Looming above all this, largely ignored by both parties, are several systemic issues, ones that dwarf those that are most heavily argued and fought. The Big Three of these are the national debt, Social Security, and Medicare/Medicaid.
The national debt is approaching twenty trillion dollars, a number of such staggering magnitude that metaphors and illustrations seem inadequate. If we laid dollar bills end-to-end as a continuous circle around the Earth, we’d have to make that circle seventy-eight thousand times before we hit $20T. If we laid them end-to-end, they’d reach the Sun and back, TWENTY-ONE TIMES. Those dollar bills would require over 300,000 tractor trailers to haul around. If apportioned across the American population, each of us, including every child and infant, is on the hook for $61,000. Our brains simply aren’t wired to comprehend a number so staggering.
Social Security, the “trust fund” set up as a forced savings/retirement program back in 1935, is an empty box. Well, not truly empty, since it’s stuffed full of IOUs from the government, but those IOUs are only as enforceable as far as the good will of our legislators goes (in other words, they can change the rules and thus what’s owed whenever they want). This wasn’t always (entirely) the case. It dates back to the 1960s when LBJ changed the government’s accounting rules so that the Social Security surpluses (up until very recently, contributions exceeded outlays) would be included in the overall budget instead of as a separate item. This served to mask the size of the government’s budget deficits created by the Viet Nam war to casual observers. No President or administration has chosen to undo this shenanigan, and SS has, in effect, become just another source of revenue for the government. Yes, it continues to be sold as a retirement program, and most people consider the monies that have been taken from their paychecks as “theirs,” due and payable upon their retirement. Thing is – “their” money has been spent. It’s not there. It doesn’t exist, other than as a revocable promise of a future payment. The unfunded liability of this promise is about $25T. It exceeds the national debt, if you can imagine.
Medicare/Medicaid is structured as Social Security is, i.e. as a “pay as you go” system where current beneficiaries are covered by contributions from current workers. Its unfunded liability equals the national debt and Social Security’s unfunded liability combined, and that’s presuming its costs don’t continue to explode.
These problems aren’t new. Reagan recognized the impending surge in payments with the retirement of the Baby Boomer generation, and increased the Social Security payroll tax to cover it. George W. Bush attempted (and failed) to reform and “fix” Social Security back in 2004/2005. And, the truth is that SS has been a pay-as-you-go system since its inception. As has Medicare. As for the national debt, it has increased every single year since the early 1950s. But wait!, some will cry, because Clinton ran surpluses his last two years in office. Remember that accounting trick that LBJ started? Clinton’s “surpluses” existed solely because of that accounting trick (and because of the increased revenue from Reagan’s SS changes in 1983). Yes, indeed, the national debt went up even in Clinton’s “surplus” years.
The number of people concerned by the Big Three political issues is small. This gives politicians little incentive, and thus little interest, in tackling them. Instead, the pols talk up lesser issues, most of which involve spending more money rather than less, and which lend themselves more readily to binary partisanship.
Worse than the apathy or ignorance that many have regarding the Big Three is the existence of the deniers and apologists. Yes, indeed, there are people who believe that the concerns some express for the $80T of total government debt (a figure that, if you can imagine, is actually considered a low estimate) are unfounded or even tendentious. There are folks who say that SS and Medicare are fine through the next couple decades, that the national debt has proven to be no big deal, and that there are more pressing concerns facing Americans today.
Edgar Allan Poe wrote his famous short story The Pit And The Pendulum 175 years ago. In his tale of torment, the narrator was subject to multiple tortures by Spanish inquisitors. Among them was a pendulum with a razor-sharp blade that swung above the narrator, who was strapped to a table. With each swing, the pendulum dropped a bit closer to the narrator’s chest.
Our political system increasingly feels like this pendulum, with repeated swings between the two major parties and a peril that grows ever more dire with each iteration. The “out of power” party promises to fix all that the “in power” party broke, did wrong or failed to fix, and in turn breaks things, does things wrong and fails to fix things. Voters, having short memories and seeking immediate gratification, swing the pendulum back, but they don’t notice how it continues to drop. As with Poe’s protagonist, the threat of pain and ugly death grows nearer with each iteration, but unlike Poe’s protagonist, too few of us want to expend the effort to make it stop. Perhaps we feel like we’ll have “gotten ours” before the pain is inflicted. Perhaps we feel like the pendulum is still too high up for us to worry about right now. Perhaps we feel like some hero is going to come rescue us before the knife cuts into our flesh. Or, perhaps (and this is the most likely, in my opinion), we are simply unaware of the descent of the pendulum. Perhaps the pendulum is shrouded in mist and fog, and perhaps that mist and fog are maintained there by the people we rely on for casting sunshine on the dirty and secret workings of government. Perhaps, the Big Three elephants in the room are a problem that neither party can effectively blame on the other, and so the sun-shiners (aka the Press) don’t see benefit to their preferred tribe/team/party by telling us all about them.
Make no mistake, however. The Big Three pendulum will cut into our flesh at some point. Yes, we are strapped to the table, and breaking free of those straps will take effort and cause some pain. We could choose to simply lie there, and hope that we die of natural causes before the pendulum cuts us. Or, we could fight to break loose and then fight to slow or stop the descent of the pendulum.
The straps, as you can guess, are the politicians, the deniers, the apologists, the ignorant, the indifferent, the partisans and the biased press. They are numerous, and they are strong, and we cannot break free of them individually. Our only hope is to increase our own strength and our own ranks, by recruiting the indifferent and the ignorant. It is only then that we might escape the pain, that we might address the big issues that threaten all of our futures, and that we might break free of the endless, disappointing back-and-forth between the parties.
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