Goldsmith is an attorney and former law partner, adjunct law professor, superior court judge, San Diego city attorney, California state legislator and mayor of Poway. He is a contributing columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune.
Just as 2023 was ending, the United States reached a new milestone — a $34 trillion national debt, the amount our government owes to its creditors. By comparison, in 1980 our national debt was $907 billion.
Unless we address this out-of-control debt, we may find ourselves on the so-called Tytler cycle.
Alexander Tytler was an 18th century professor who studied Greek and Roman history.
“Democracy will continue to exist until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury,” he theorized in describing the Tytler cycle. “From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.”
Was Tytler correct?
Certainly, our nation’s founders were concerned. In Federalist 10, James Madison warned that factions of people who band together in self-interest can impose their will in a democracy to extract benefits. The thinking was, however, that the slow and deliberative process for enacting legislation in the new nation’s representative democracy — rather than pure democracy — would help dilute the impact of such factions.
Whether that thinking was correct in today’s America remains to be seen.
On the surface, today’s America appears caught in loose fiscal policies described by Tytler. It does not take much digging to find many imioned factions seeking to extract benefits from the public treasury.
The days of former President John Kennedy’s “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” are over.
In addition to countless existing social service programs and foreign commitments, governments are now being petitioned to spend more for homeless housing, repayment of student loans, business stipends, reparations, guaranteed basic income, child care, health care, foreign military aid and much more.
Every demand for more spending is grounded in a nice-sounding justification often coupled with the comment, “after all, we are a rich country.”
But, are we?
The truth is that our loose fiscal policies have already resulted in a government that is broke. The federal government spends more every year than it brings in just to fund existing programs, national defense and interest on the national debt. In fiscal 2023, alone, the budget deficit was nearly $1.7 trillion.
Due to annual budget deficits, our government’s accumulated national debt of $34 trillion now exceeds our nation’s annual gross domestic product.
Uncontrolled federal spending has helped fuel inflation which is, in effect, a tax on all Americans.
Our growing debt also threatens our economy.
The Congressional Budget Office has long opined that growth of the nation’s debt is on an unsustainable path.
Recently, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell agreed on CBS’s “60 Minutes” that the U.S. is on “an unsustainable fiscal path.”
“We are projected to spend more on interest payments in the next decade than we will on the entire defense budget,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “How can anyone possibly think this trend is sustainable?”
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon was quoted in Fortune as saying the U.S. economy is heading off the cliff if something is not done to address the government’s excessive debt.
“We see the cliff,” he reportedly said. “It’s about 10 years out. We’re going 60 miles an hour [toward it].”
The last time this nation had a serious focus on the national debt was 1992, when Ross Perot ran for president. That focus continued through Bill Clinton’s presidency and produced a bipartisan balanced budget.
Today, few politicians meaningfully discuss how to balance the budget.
ittedly, it is easier to kick the can down the street than to set priorities.
That is exactly what the Tytler cycle predicts. And, its prediction of what always transpires is even more chilling than the overspending.
It is time to face our fiscal crisis for the sake of America’s survival.
We should not this mess on to our children and grandchildren. We are better than that.
All candidates for federal office should be grilled on exactly how they would balance the budget and reduce our nation’s debt.
