Along with Gustave de Beaumont, a fellow magistrate, Tocqueville conceived the idea that by traveling to America he could penetrate the secret of the modern world, in which democracy and equality were destined to rule.Īlexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont in America reproduces the journey of these two friends in an authoritative and elegant volume. As per the observation that has been attributed by some to Alexis de Tocqueville, democracy will last in America until Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.Alexis de Tocqueville, a young aristocrat of twenty-five, worried deeply about the future of France as well as his own fate in his native country, which had just experienced its second revolution in less than fifty years. Add to that the new spending programs that are continually being proposed by our political class in order to garner votes, such as the college loan forgiveness program conveniently proposed right before the last election, and we are in a fiscal death spiral. It’s a dynamic process of empire building. Every government program has developed its own constituency that not only refuses to accept any cutbacks, but also demands expansion. The primary cause of this pending fiscal crisis is that countless individual Americans, businesses, public employee unions, state governments, special interest groups and many others are engaged in a mad scramble for federal largesse from a bloated federal government that has grown way too big and is out of control like a runaway computer in a science fiction movie where no one remembers how or where to pull the plug. It doesn’t take an economist to know that this won’t end well.
We are now spending much more than we are producing as a nation. In 1981, the federal debt was equal to 32% of GDP. Even more ominous than those raw numbers is the relationship of those figures to gross domestic product.
It’s now over $31 trillion with no end in sight and nothing but more multitrillion-dollar deficits projected going forward.īut it gets worse. By the end of the 2000s, it had reached $12 trillion, thus doubling every decade. In the 1980s, the debt ceiling reached $3 trillion, and by the end of the 1990s, it was $6 trillion.
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