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04/13/2005: "Irresponsibility is SO Sexy!"

Who would be more appealing to his target market – an irresponsible rock star who flouted convention at every opportunity, or a reputable rock star with an air of probity and seriousness? Here’s the deal – irresponsibility is viscerally attractive! Most of the time this is a harmless foible of human nature, something that might get you talked into a tattoo you really didn’t want by an irresponsible friend. Irresponsibility only impacts entire nations when its important leaders turn out to be irresponsible; they’re the ones with the power to really screw things up. Fortunately, this doesn’t seem to have been a significant historical issue for the United States because there were always natural limits how much irresponsibility a President could get away with. Here’s why: irresponsible behavior ultimately resulted in higher taxes, either immediately to pay for immediate objects of desire (say, a military incursion) or eventually, to clean up a mess (say, a depression). Long-haul irresponsibility has not been feasible because voters pulled the plug when the bill arrived. Not feasible until now. Today we have a major political party that has adopted irresponsibility as its long-term strategy (a strategy of two decades, in fact). And it can’t be disputed that it’s worked for them bigtime! How have they gotten away with it? I see it as a perfect storm, the intersection of three perfectly balanced conditions: 1) Political true believers with an above-average lust for power such that they’ll do Whatever It Takes. (In fairness, though, there’s nothing really special there – plenty of past pols were also into WIT.) 2). An entire generation of voters so self-absorbed as to enthusiastically embrace a siren call to irresponsibility from their leaders in order to score mounds of free goodies from Uncle Sam. (The Boomers are probably special among American generations in this regard, but let’s say they’re just average, for the sake of argument.) Here’s the third and most essential front of our perfect storm of irresponsibility: 3) Foreign governments with extra trillions to invest and a perception that funding US fiscal irresponsibility is a wise use of their money. That’s what’s really unique about the current situation. Can you imagine the money men of the 1930s (or any other era) putting a huge portion of their wealth on the line to bail out foolish behavior by a government? If there’s nobody around to finance federal foolishness, taxes have to go up, which is why irresponsibility has never before worked as a long-term political strategy. Calling it a long-term strategy doesn’t make it a sustainable strategy, though. Despite GOP talk of “permanent” tax cuts, rest assured that taxes will absolutely have to go up for the suckers (AKA American Posterity – our children and grandchildren) stuck with the bill from the last twenty years of GOP free lunch. I wonder if they’ll find irresponsibility to be as sexy as we do!