Barry Grey

It is now one week out from the “X-date,” June 1, when the US will purportedly default on its debt obligations, triggering a “catastrophe,” unless the Democrats and Republicans can agree on a bipartisan deal raising the debt ceiling in return for brutal cuts in social programs on which tens of millions of working people rely.

Behind the mutual recriminations between the two capitalist parties and the stage-managed crisis negotiations, there is a basic agreement: All of the social gains made by the working class in the course of more than a century of struggle must be wiped out to pay for the drive by the American ruling class to remove, by force of arms, Russia and China as obstacles to US hegemony, even if it means triggering a nuclear war.

The social cuts implemented in an eventual debt limit/budget deal will be only a down payment. They will set the stage for an assault on the core entitlement programs—Medicare and Social Security—extracted from the ruling class in the class battles of the 1930s and 1960s.

On Wednesday, with the talks between President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy having hit a “speed bump” and the financial markets indicating increasing nervousness, the Washington Post published an editorial backing Biden’s proposal for a two-year spending freeze and $1 trillion in cuts over the next decade. At the same time, the newspaper owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos reiterated its demand that both parties tackle what it deems the real problem, the cost of the mandatory programs that stand outside of annual discretionary spending—Social Security and Medicare.

“Mr. McCarthy keeps claiming the nation has a ‘spending problem,’” the Post wrote. “The part he leaves out is the spending problem is driven largely by the fact that Social Security, Medicare and health-care costs are shooting up. Yet House Republicans and Mr. Biden don’t want to touch Social Security and Medicare.”

The editorial is part of an expanding wave of media commentary on the need to “reform” or privatize these core social programs. On Sunday, CNN’s “State of the Union” program featured Louisiana Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, a so-called “moderate” who advocates tying Social Security to the stock market and essentially privatizing it.

“Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan interviewed congressmen Brian Fitzpatrick, Republican of Pennsylvania, and Josh Gottheimer, Democrat of New Jersey, members of the “moderate” Problem Solvers Caucus in the House. Fitzpatrick declared:

“Medicare will run out of money in 2028. Social Security will run out of money in 2034 … until we tackle the mandatory spending and get a handle on our long-term sustainability of our debt and deficit, we’re just playing around the margins.”

McCarthy himself spoke along similar lines before his meeting Monday with Biden, while refraining from explicitly targeting Social Security and Medicare. “I don’t want you to think at the end of the day, the bill that we come up with is going to solve all this problem,” he told reporters. “But it’s going to be a step to finally acknowledge our problem and put one step in the right direction. And we’re going to come back the next day and get the next step.”

Biden has already made a large down payment on the new austerity drive with his ending of the national COVID-19 emergency, which has not only increased the risk of infection and death from the ongoing pandemic, but authorized state governments to review their Medicaid rolls in order to terminate people’s benefits. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that between 5.3 million and 14.2 million people will lose Medicaid coverage just through that process alone.

Far from increased social spending driving the rise in the national debt, it remains sharply down, when adjusted for inflation and population growth, from the levels preceding the bipartisan Budget Control Act of 2011. That bill, which followed the financial collapse of 2008, the multitrillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street, and the imposition of wage and benefit cuts and wage tiers under the auto restructuring overseen by the Obama administration, marked the first use of the debt ceiling, previously raised as a matter of course, to impose brutal attacks on the working class.

In all the media coverage, no explanation is given as to the real causes of the soaring national debt or why it is the working class that must pay the price.

What are the real sources of the increase in the national debt to its current $31.4 trillion?

Military and war spending: The United States spent between $4 trillion and $6 trillion on the 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a Harvard analysis.

Last year alone, the Biden administration allocated $113 billion in arms to Ukraine and this year proposed a record $1 trillion Pentagon budget. Last week at the G7 summit in Hiroshima, before returning to the US and holding budget talks with McCarthy, Biden announced an additional $375 billion in arms for the right-wing puppet regime in Kiev.

Tax cuts for corporations and the rich: The George W. Bush administration enacted two rounds of tax cuts, overwhelmingly benefiting the wealthy. The Obama administration made them permanent in 2012. That has cost $4 trillion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Fig 1: Cumulative Changes in Corporate Tax Receipts and After-tax Profits

[Photo: This graph was published by the Center for American Progress. (online)]

The Trump tax cut of December 2017 handed over $2 trillion to the corporate elite, including the reduction of the official corporate tax rate to 21 percent. As Biden noted in his press conference last Sunday from Hiroshima, 55 US corporations that made $400 billion last year paid zero in taxes, and US billionaires pay an average tax rate of 8 percent.

According to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, corporate profits rose by 20 percent between 2014 and 2020, while corporate tax receipts fell by more than 60 percent (see Figure 1).

In 2018, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), corporate tax revenue as a share of GDP in the US, at 1.1 percent, was lower than every other member country except Latvia (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Corporate tax revenue to GDP, 2018

[Photo: Graph was published by the Center for American Progress.]

Bank and corporate bailouts: The Bush and Obama administrations enacted $2 trillion in emergency measures following the subprime mortgage collapse in 2008 and the ensuing Great Recession. In addition, the Federal Reserve funneled trillions more to Wall Street through its program of “quantitative easing.” Meanwhile, tens of millions of workers lost their homes and life savings as a result of the criminal practices of the bankers.

The Trump administration, with the support of the Democrats in Congress, allocated $3.4 trillion in the March 2020 CARES Act to unfreeze the Treasury bond market and rescue banks and corporations from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Fed added trillions more through its expansion of “quantitative easing.”

War mongering, greed and criminality have impelled the policies pursued by the parasitic American ruling elite and driven up the national debt.

(Courtesy: World Socialist Web Site, the online publication of the International Committee of the Fourth International.)

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Debt Crisis and Endless U.S. Wars

Jeffrey R. Smith

In the year 2000, the U.S. government debt was $3.5 trillion, equal to 35% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). By 2022, the debt was $24 trillion, equal to 95% of GDP. The U.S. debt is soaring, hence America’s current debt crisis. Yet both Republicans and Democrats are missing the solution: stopping America’s wars of choice and slashing military outlays.

Suppose the government’s debt had remained at a modest 35% of GDP, as in 2000. Today’s debt would be $9 billion, as opposed to $24 trillion. Why did the U.S. government incur the excess $15 trillion in debt?

The single biggest answer is the U.S. government’s addiction to war and military spending. According to the Watson Institute at Brown University, the cost of U.S. wars from fiscal year 2001 to fiscal year 2022 amounted to a whopping $8 trillion, more than half of the extra $15 trillion in debt. The other $7 trillion arose roughly equally from budget deficits caused by the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic.

To surmount the debt crisis, America needs to stop feeding the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC), the most powerful lobby in Washington. As President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned on January 17, 1961, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” Since 2000, the MIC led the U.S. into disastrous wars of choice in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and now Ukraine.

The Military-Industrial Complex long ago adopted a winning political strategy by ensuring that the military budget reaches into every Congressional district. The Congressional Research Service recently reminded Congress that, “Defense spending touches every Member of Congress’s district through pay and benefits for military servicemembers and retirees, economic and environmental impact of installations, and procurement of weapons systems and parts from local industry, among other activities.” Only a brave member of Congress would vote against the military-industry lobby, yet bravery is certainly no hallmark of Congress.

America’s annual military spending is now around $900 billion, roughly 40% of the world’s total, and greater than the next 10 countries combined. U.S. military spending in 2022 was triple that of China. According to Congressional Budget Office, the military outlays for 2024-2033 will be a staggering $10.3 trillion on current baseline. A quarter or more of that could be avoided by ending America’s wars of choice, closing down many of America’s 800 or so military bases around the world, and negotiating new arms control agreements with China and Russia.

Yet instead of peace through diplomacy, and fiscal responsibility, the MIC regularly scares the American people with a comic-book style depictions of villains whom the U.S. must stop at all costs. The post-2000 list has included Afghanistan’s Taliban, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Libya’s Moammar Qaddafi, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and recently, China’s Xi Jinping. War, we are repeatedly told, is necessary for America’s survival.

A peace-oriented foreign policy would be opposed strenuously by the military-industrial lobby but not by the public. Significant public pluralities already want less, not more, U.S. involvement in other countries’ affairs, and less, not more, US troop deployments overseas. Regarding Ukraine, Americans overwhelmingly want a “minor role” (52%) rather than a “major role” (26%) in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. This is why neither Biden nor any recent president has dared to ask Congress for any tax increase to pay for America’s wars. The public’s response would be a resounding “No!”

While America’s wars of choice have been awful for America, they have been far greater disasters for countries that America purports to be saving. As Henry Kissinger famously quipped, “To be an enemy of the United States can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.” Afghanistan was America’s cause from 2001 to 2021, until the U.S. left it broken, bankrupt, and hungry. Ukraine is now in America’s embrace, with the same likely results: ongoing war, death, and destruction.

The military budget could be cut prudently and deeply if the U.S. replaced its wars of choice and arms races with real diplomacy and arms agreements. If presidents and members of congress had only heeded the warnings of top American diplomats such as William Burns, the U.S. Ambassador to Russia in 2008, and now CIA Director, the U.S. would have protected Ukraine’s security through diplomacy, agreeing with Russia that the U.S. would not expand NATO into Ukraine if Russia also kept its military out of Ukraine. Yet relentless NATO expansion is a favorite cause of the MIC; new NATO members are major customers of U.S. armaments.

The U.S. has also unilaterally abandoned key arms control agreements. In 2002, the U.S. unilaterally walked out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. And rather than promote nuclear disarmament—as the U.S. and other nuclear powers are required to do under Article VI the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—the Military-Industrial Complex has sold Congress on plans to spend more than $600 billion by 2030 to “modernize” the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Now the MIC is talking up the prospect of war with China over Taiwan. The drumbeats of war with China are stoking the military budget, yet war with China is easily avoidable if the U.S. adheres to the One-China policy that properly underpins U.S.-China relations. Such a war should be unthinkable. More than bankrupting the U.S., it could end the world.

Military spending is not the only budget challenge. Aging and rising healthcare costs add to the fiscal woes. According to the Congressional Budget Office, debt will reach 185 percent of GDP by 2052 if current policies remain unchanged. Healthcare costs should be capped while taxes on the rich should be raised. Yet facing down the military-industrial lobby is the vital first step to putting America’s fiscal house in order, needed to save the U.S., and possibly the world, from America’s perverse lobby-driven politics.

(Jeffrey R. Smith is a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University working with Dr. Jonathan Levine to understand how nature-based climate solutions are likely to affect biodiversity. Courtesy: Common Dreams, a US non-profit news portal.)