On the looming national precipice.
Mitch Daniels, the former governor of Indiana and ex-president of Purdue University, recently penned a provocative article in The Washington Post acknowledging that he may have been too optimistic in thinking that the United States could navigate its political and financial problems without a major crisis. He was certain until recently, he reports, that the nation would eventually overcome its mounting troubles, as it has on many occasions in the past. He is no longer quite so sure about that, as he writes in the article.
Governor Daniels cites several factors behind his growing doubts, including rising debt, the inability of Washington to rein in spending, and a widening gulf between the two political parties. These were already significant problems a decade ago, but they are growing more serious year by year. The federal debt has doubled over the past decade from $16 trillion in 2013 to more than $34 trillion this year, with trillion-dollar budget deficits forecast for years to come, even as interest rates are rising. The two parties, led respectively by President Biden and Donald Trump, seem to live in separate political universes. Instead of trying to find agreement on important issues, they focus instead on finding ways to destroy one another. Governor Daniels is right: things do not look good.
In the course of his essay, Governor Daniels cited my own book Shattered Consensus (2015) as one of the volumes published in recent years that forecasted a national crisis of some kind. In a review of the book several years ago in The Wall Street Journal, he sympathized with my argument in part, but also pointed out that I was vague as to how such a crisis might unfold. He had a point. While I had a sense that a crisis was developing, I was unsure what events might precipitate it or how the crisis might be resolved. I wrote that rising debt would eventually cause a financial crisis as the Baby-Boom Generation retired in the 2020s and as spending on entitlements soared. It did not appear, given the drift of events, that political leaders would make the difficult decisions required to head off such a crisis. This is where Governor Daniels and I disagreed: he was confident that leaders, in a crunch, would step up to make those decisions and accept the necessary sacrifices.
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James Piereson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.