Streetwise Professor

With 5 weeks and a day until the election, the vacuity of the campaigns is manifest. What is particularly disturbing is that two seismic issues–the US government’s parlous fiscal state and the broken American military–are not even mentioned, let alone addressed.

With respect to Harris, this is not surprising. Her campaign is refusing to discuss any issue whatsoever. And maybe not surprising with Trump either. He has his hobby horse issues and little time for anything else.

With respect to the US government’s finances, what is striking is that they were once a centerpiece of US political discussions and campaigns. Reagan made deficits a major part of his campaign in 1980, and did so to a somewhat lesser degree in 1984. If memory serves, budget issues were also actively discussed in the 1976 campaign: Jimmy Carter advanced “zero based budgeting” as a means of getting government spending under control. Even Clinton took budget issues seriously, if grudgingly. Remember Carville’s remark: ” I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.”

Now US budgetary woes are far far far worse than in 1980 or the early-1990s. But nary a peep from either candidate, or either party generally. This despite the facts that (a) inflation is a major issue, and (b) as hard as the Democrats try to deny it, the most likely cause of the inflationary spurt at in the first couple of years of the Biden administration was the huge spurt in spending. (And yes, some of this was Trump’s doing–which may be why his is silent on the issue).

The US is on an unsustainable fiscal course. The longer it remains on this course the more disastrous the grounding will be. The only real question is how the government will structure the inevitable default unless spending growth is cut dramatically: future inflation is the most likely way. The hear no-see no-speak no deficit approach of both parties will lead to catastrophe.

With respect to the military, the list of structural problems is large, but two stand out: recruiting and procurement.

Trump sometimes talks about one thing that is a source of recruiting woes: the insidious penetration of wokeness and DEI into the military. Harris will of course never talk about that, least of all to say that it is a problem. But the recruiting crisis had multiple causes, and at the very least a responsible presidential candidate would (a) recognize the problem, and (b) pledge the creation of a red team task force from outside the Pentagon to analyze the problem, identify causes, and recommend fixes.

Insofar as wokeness is concerned, a West Point graduate wrote a stinging article about how it has taken over West Point. In response, the PR flack at USMA (a full colonel no less) wrote that the critical article was “problematic.” Problematic is a verbal tic with the woke, and its use in this context adds “QED” to the critical article.

Procurement is also a dire problem, especially in the Navy. Just today it was announced that there may be a serious bad welds issue on subs and carriers built at Newport News Shipyard. But that is just the latest in a series of failures in Navy shipbuilding. Everything is late and way over budget. And some of the things that have been built in the last 20 years (LCS and Zumwalt in particular) have proved to be misguided efforts that add modestly to hull count but not to combat capability.

Trump talks about the China threat. Harris not so much (of course) but the administration does. The military’s structural problems–severe enough that it may not be exaggeration to say that it is broken–seriously jeopardize the US’s ability to counter China and indeed may be an inducement for China to be more aggressive. Serious candidates would make this an issue. But we don’t have serious candidates.

Which will lead to serious problems down the road. And not too far down the road at that. Indeed, it may be the case that whoever wins in November 2024, they will regret it, because the “winner” will reap the whirlwind that has been sown on spending, on the military, on immigration, and myriad other matters over the past decade plus.