For E.J. Dionne, Weinergate was an epiphany: we are living in Late Imperial Rome. Andrew Sullivan realized it when the country almost put Sarah Palin in a position to finger the launch codes. Sullivan asked his readers for their opinions, and he got everything from the Clinton impeachment to the Terry Schiavo case.
Now the correct answers were, 1. Comparing our nation's decline to Rome's fall is erroneous because Rome never "fell," it just relocated to Constantinople, and 2. If this is a "fall," what a splendid fall it is!
But let's play along anyway. One reason why Rome fell was that maintaining an empire is awfully expensive, and the Romans lacked an instrument to pay for imperial upkeep that we enjoy today: bonds.
To pay the bills, the Romans had but two options. They could devalue the currency, which they did on several occasions in the third century--to disastrous effect.
Or they could raise taxes, but this meant employing more revenuers to beat the bushes for tax-evaders. Those extra tax agents had to be paid: a vicious circle.
The rich were able to stiff the tax collectors by retiring to their country estates, well-protected by their own private security details. Small farmers could not, and crushed by the burden of high taxes, many simply abandoned their property. In his book Before France and Germany Patrick Geary estimates that 20% of the arable land in the late Roman West sat idle for just this reason.
If you're a barbarian living in a hovel across a porous border with the greatest empire in history, whacha gonna do? Nature abhors a vacuum. You're gonna help yourself to some land nobody's missing. Now the Romans recognized that this was a problem, so at times they settled whole tribes of barbarians on empty tracts of land within their border, provided that said barbarians would secure the border against any further incursions--a late antique guest worker program. And this is what historians call, "The Barbarian Invasions."
And that is How Rome Fell. Or rather, that is how Rome came to be under new management.
No public debt.
And that is why we aren't living in late imperial Rome. We've got plenty of public debt.
Too much really. The projected growth in health care costs means that in a generation Medicare alone will consume the entire U.S. budget. We have to get our long term debt problem under control, and if we do it sooner rather than later, and with a mix of spending cuts and tax increases (our tax rates are as low as they've been since 1950), the pain will be spread around so as to be barely noticeable.
But if the nation ever adopts some of the right's crazier ideas, like a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution, then we will be doomed. Public debt allows the country to find a safe harbor in economic storms. That safe harbor is future prosperity. And if the government issues bonds to make wise investments in the common good (education, transportation, health care), future prosperity will be greater than it otherwise would be. And that makes judicious borrowing against the future a smart choice.
If you don't buy my analogy with late imperial Rome, there's a lesson to be learned from our own history. The last time the Federal Government paid off the national debt was in 1835. Two years later the country sank into a deep depression.
So as Congress and the President negotiate the terms of increasing the debt limit, it's important that the agreement not limit our ability to nurse a fragile economy back to health or to lay the groundwork for a more prosperous future.
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