This is the United States of America,”
declared President Obama to the burghers of Liberty, Mo., on
Friday.
“We’re not some banana republic.”
He was talking about the Annual Raising of the Debt Ceiling, which
glorious American tradition seems to come round earlier every year.
“This is not a deadbeat nation,” President Obama continued. “We don’t
run out on our tab.” True. But we don’t pay it off either. We just keep
running it up, ever higher. And every time the bartender says, “Mebbe
you’ve had enough, pal,” we protest, “Jush another couple trillion for
the road. Set ’em up, Joe.” And he gives you that look that kinda says
he wishes you’d run out on your tab back when it was $23.68.
Still, Obama is right. We’re not a banana republic, if only because
the debt of banana republics is denominated in a currency other than
their own — i.e., the U.S. dollar. When you’re the guys who print the
global currency, you can run up debts undreamt of by your average
generalissimo. As Obama explained in another of his recent speeches,
“Raising the debt ceiling, which has been done over a hundred times,
does not increase our debt.” I won’t even pretend to know what he and
his speechwriters meant by that one, but the fact that raising the debt
ceiling “has been done over a hundred times” does suggest that spending
more than it takes in is now a permanent feature of American government.
And no one has plans to do anything about it. Which is certainly banana
republic-esque.
Is all this spending necessary? Every day, the foot-of-page-37 news
stories reveal government programs it would never occur to your
dimestore caudillo to blow money on. On Thursday, it was the Food and
Drug Administration blowing just shy of $200 grand to find out whether
its Twitter and Facebook presence is “well-received.” A fifth of a
million dollars isn’t even a rounding error in most departmental
budgets, so nobody cares. But the FDA is one of those sclerotic American
institutions that has near to entirely seized up. In October 1920, it
occurred to an Ontario doctor called Frederick Banting that insulin
might be isolated and purified and used to treat diabetes; by January
1923, Eli Lilly & Co were selling insulin to American pharmacies: A
little over two years from concept to market. Now the FDA adds at least
half-a-decade to the process, and your chances of making it through are
far slimmer: As recently as the late Nineties, they were approving 157
new drugs per half-decade. Today it’s less than half that.
But they’ve got $182,000 to splash around on finding out whether people really
like them on Facebook, or they’re just saying that. So they’ve given
the dough to a company run by Dan Beckmann, a former “new media aide” to
President Obama. That has the whiff of the banana republic about it,
too.
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