God Help America

Martin Meenagh writes:

American politics, as envisaged by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton long ago, is a game of self-interest and coalition. America was the world's first intentionally big republic. Its philosophy, built into its governing system, was that laws would only be made and coalitions only formed with the purpose of maximising the interests of all involved within a wider compromise, all in the knowledge that today's majority could be tomorrow's minority.

Over time, this has hardened into an expectation that there will be a little something for all sponsors of any given law. America's laws are omnibus bills. If you're elected from New Hampshire, why else would you vote for a Californian bill--and don't tell me patriotism works better on the voters, one can almost hear the politicians saying. The late Senator Everett Dirksen's voice is more apposite; 'a billion here, and a billion there, and soon, you're talking about real money'.

So I've been reading the latest, Senate-initiated attempt at the 'stave off Armageddon by giving cocaine addicts and Croesians with a non-Midas touch charity' bill. It piggybacks on other bills and uses their momentum to carry itself on, but I suppose that one could suggest that it weighs down on worthy proposals, if one took the opposite perspective.

It makes interesting reading. The bill is taking on a 'progressive' hue as its backers become more desperate. All this after they began with an inflated reprise of a 1989 bailout bill under the first Bush, which at the time cost nearly two hundred billion dollars.

For instance, billions will now go to making health insurers place mental health insurance on a par with physical illness. I admire and applaud that, but the European side of me thinks that it should really be in a health bill. The Irish side understands.

A second section of the bill bars genetic identification tests to discriminate in employment. Another amends student loan repayment defaults. Most of this is in tribute to Paul Wellstone, a liberal Senator from the Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota who died a few years ago, and whom many there, as I remember, miss.

The irony is that the actual appropriation itself is hidden away behind the help for mental health and genetic screening provisions. When one looks at the cash on offer, the scale is staggering. Remember, this bill runs alongside other business which last week offered forty billion dollars for homeland security, four hundred and eighty seven billion for the pentagon, seventy three billion for construction and veterans affairs and twenty three billion for disaster relief. I make that six hundred and twenty three billion, and those of course are just part of the American budget.

Look at the Bill. It mandates a good deal of money and authority to co-ordinate with foreign authorities and central banks. Not governments; Andrew Jackson must be spinning on his spit in hell.

The bill also requires that seven hundred billion is offered in stages and builds in safeguards; but it allows for a rise in the national debt by thirteen hundred billion. Is this because tax revenues will fall in the coming recession, or the drafters don't expect to be paid back properly any time soon?

The FBI is extended into financial services, and executive stock options are limited after half a million. Does anyone raise an eyebrow nowadays at G-men and taxmen being set on anyone?

How long before a reckoning? States cannot just keep spending like this.

It's so ironic; Obama runs a campaign on the slogan 'yes we can', and will spend the next eight years, if you look at the polls, telling people 'no you can't'. All of this whilst a financial, military and security cage is gilded all around him. God help America.