American government is not merely bad. It is catastrophically bad.
In the first quarter of the 21st Century, there are no less than three examples of catastrophic US government policies: the Iraq War, Covid19, and the ever-mounting US National Debt.
Each of these US government-induced disasters is bipartisan. Both parties share responsibility for policies that have cost untold lives and treasure, yet no one is ever held accountable. Instead, we just move on to the next catastrophe.[i]
Meanwhile, the American political class encourages us to hate and make war on each other over immigration and other wedge controversies. The media complicitly inflames such issues, because it’s good for business.
Let’s shut out the noise and think. We should not let Iraq and Covid get flushed down the memory hole, much as we might wish to forget (the new Iran War is a stark reminder). And as the consequences of our surreal national debt fall upon us, we need to focus not so much on who, but what, is really to blame.
* * *
The 21st Century had barely opened when terrorist-piloted passenger aircraft slammed into the twin towers and the pentagon. It was an ominous start to the new millennium.
The response was an irrational attempt to remake the culture of the Muslim world by “liberating” Iraq. Other motivations were also in play. The CIA mistakenly believed that the regime of Saddam Hussein possessed significant weapons of mass destruction. Feeble attempts were made to connect Iraq to the 911 attacks. Some contend the war was all about oil.
Though the motivations were likely mixed and murky, the awful consequences are far clearer. The Iraq War completely backfired on US strategic interests. Rather than create the neo-con-expected democracy domino effect in the Middle East, the American invasion fueled more terrorism. Out of America’s misguided war in Iraq emerged ISIS, terrorists known for their televised beheadings. ISIS filled a power vacuum in northern Iraq and Syria from 2014 to 2019. The US invasion also empowered the world’s most aggressive state-sponsor of terrorism, the Islamic Republic of Iran, (with which we are now at war) the home of Shiite Islam and a nation to which Iraq’s Shiite majority naturally looks to for leadership.
Estimates of Iraqi deaths in the war vary from 200,000 all the way up to 600,000, based on excess mortality data. Over four thousand US soldiers were killed in combat, another 1,000 died of non-combat related causes, and 31,000 were wounded. The war cost the American taxpayers $2-3 trillion.
The frightening specter of Covid19 appeared less than ten years later. Total excess deaths around the world are on the scale of a holocaust, exceeding 18 million people. During the pandemic, Americans were told three things with near certainty by their government:
First, our authorities said that Covid19 likely originated from a wet market in Wuhan, and certainly not from the nearby Wuhan Institute for Virology. Dr. Fauci called the notion of the virus being hatched in that lab a “conspiracy theory.” But we now know that the intelligence services of the United States, the UK and Germany all understood that the virus likely emerged from the Wuhan lab. CDC Director Robert Redfield was told by his Chinese counterpart, George Gao, in 2020, that the virus did not emerge from the wet market, as was being claimed. Dr. Redfield knew the truth, so why did Dr. Fauci lie?
Could it be because the United States helped fund the research that led to Covid19? According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Dr. Fauci, as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had approved $3.4 million to a group called the “Ecohealth Alliance,” of which $600,000 was subcontracted out for research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In addition, USAID reported giving the Ecohealth alliance another $1.1 million. Notably, the purpose of the original grant from NIH was a study for “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.”
A second untruth told to the American people was that aggressive non-pharmaceutical interventions—like mass lockdowns, school and businesses closures, and masking—were best practices, scientifically.
Yet it was the government, not its opponents, that practiced fringe science. Princeton University scholars, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, in their book, In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, explain how mainstream science prior to Covid19 had rejected lockdowns and other non-pharmaceutical interventions for respiratory epidemics. As recently as 2019, the WHO had recommended against almost everything our government did in its attempt to contain Covid19, which the best science said would be futile, and would cause unintended harms.
The unintended harms were incalculable. Our children, who were never more susceptible to the disease than to the common flu, were masked, locked inside, affixed to computer screens and suffered months on end of compromised mental health and lost learning for no good scientific reason. Business collapsed. Normal medical screenings, leading to countless deaths, were postponed. Suicides skyrocketed in the oppressive environment of government-induced panic. Beaches and public parks were closed, as if to prove the irrational basis of state policies. Trillions were added to the national debt.
Exposing the unscientific nature of the covid response, Macedo and Lee go out of their way to inform their readers of their own politics, which are on the Left. In fact, the most prominent critics of the government’s policies were people who had traditionally voted Democratic, yet all opposition to the government narratives was branded as “right wing.” Citizens who had reasonable concerns about experimental vaccines were scapegoated by their own government, which rather than project calm and reason, promoted division and hysteria.
The third thing the American people were told was that rapidly developed vaccines, including MRNA products, were the only “safe and effective” medical means of controlling the disease, but we now know that the vaccines did not, in fact, slow the spread of Covid19, which is what had been promised. We were also not told that booster after booster would be required.
Extremely accomplished medical practitioners testify that proven treatments against Covid19 existed, but our government did everything in its power to discourage their use, including censorship. Whether or not the vaccines meet traditional safety standards is to this day a highly controversial question. Many accomplished doctors say that they do not.
This much is beyond question. No one has been held accountable for the terrible harms done to the public as a consequence of the Covid debacle. There is no Covid Truth Commission, no attempt for reasonable professionals on all sides of every question to sit down and determine what actually transpired and what it all means.
No one is ever held responsible. We simply sit back and wait for the next government-induced catastrophe.
In the cases of Iraq or Covid, a member of Congress might plead ignorance in matters that are inherently complex. Though not an excuse, it’s at least an explanation.
The same cannot be said about the national debt.
A bright middle-schooler could look at the following data and perceive the problem.
US NATIONAL DEBT BY YEAR (In Trillions of $)
2001 — 5.81
2002 — 6.23
2003 — 6.78
2004 — 7.38
2005 — 7.93
2006 — 8.51
2007 — 9.01
2008 — 10.03
2009 — 11.91
2010 — 13.56
2011 — 14.79
2012 — 16.07
2013 — 16.74
2014 — 17.82
2015 — 18.15
2016 — 19.57
2017 — 20.24
2018 — 21.52
2019 — 22.72
2020 — 26.95
2021 — 28.43
2022 — 30.93
2023 — 33.17
2024 — 34.88
2025 — 38.00
Why is Congress bankrupting the nation it is elected to serve?
There’s only one obvious answer.
Our elected officials are not concerned with the long-term future of the nation or its people.
Rather, our political system produces politicians who care more about their next re-election than they do about the next generation.
We cannot even begin to imagine the consequences of the accumulated national debt, above, which does not include the unfunded liabilities of Medicare and Social Security. These programs will add about another $100 trillion in red ink.
The interest the United States pays on its national debt is now larger than the entire US defense budget.
“Irresponsible” does not even begin to describe the financial state of things.
The most likely results will be a generation or more of severe economic distress, including rampant inflation, widespread unemployment and decreasing standards of living.
We need to get to the bottom of these rolling government-induced calamities. What is causing such calamitous American government?
(Next: Does our American political system promote government by sociopaths?)
[i] As of this writing, the United States has launched yet another war in the Middle East, this one against the Islamic Republic of Iran. A declaration of war is the constitutional responsibility of Congress and Congress alone. At least the Iraq war was authorized by Congress. Will the Iran War turn out to be another enormous disaster like Iraq? Or will a heinous terrorist regime finally end and be replaced by something far better? Only time will tell, but such momentous world-changing decisions should not be made by one man. This is not what the authors of the Constitution intended.