Total spending on SNAP (Food Stamps) was $119B in 2022. 41M Americans received SNAP benefits in the same year implying approximately $2,900 per year in average benefits. Compare that to the $75B in contracts awarded to Lockheed Martin, a major defense contractor in 2020. That amount is roughly 1.5x the total budget of the Department of State and USAID. Lockheed is the same company that has been developing the F-35 for over 24 years with total spending of over $400B but is still not there yet.
But if you followed the debt ceiling negotiations of the last couple of months, it felt like SNAP benefits and lack of work requirements for the beneficiaries was the key reason we are drowning in deficits and debt. Not the wasteful spending on the military-industrial complex, or operating military bases that have lost their relevance for decades but pork-barrel politics has ensured those bases stay intact to protect local jobs. Nor the $281B the federal government spent in improper payments in 2021, without including the fraud in covid relief programs.
Away from the budget and debt ceiling, we are facing problems at a scale never encountered before. China is a competitor unlike any we have seen before. The Soviet Union at its peak never had the economic heft and global integration that China has. Based on the evidence of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we can also easily make an argument that China’s military is also much stronger than that of the Soviet Union at its peak.
China has an economic and political philosophy that is far more appealing to the world and they are no longer afraid to promote it. They want to promote that as a viable alternative to the rules-based order we have so carefully built since World War II. Our allies no longer trust us given how dysfunctional our democracy and decision-making have become. But, all we hear on the national stage is rhetoric, no substantive debate.
More than a quarter of Ambassadors’ posts remain unconfirmed by the Senate. State and USAID have to fight to get a nominal increase in budgets ($1.7B or 3% increase in 2022!) while China has given over a trillion dollars in aid since 2000, an average of $40B per year, becoming the biggest player in this domain. When we hear of many prominent countries in the South staying neutral on Ukraine, it’s because we have ceded supremacy on aid and development to China.
Closer to home, we have agreed for decades that our immigration system is broken but continue to do nothing about it. We know from basic math that Social Security and Medicare would go bankrupt in our lifetime but we choose to kick the can down the road. We have incarcerated people at a scale never seen before in the developed world but we choose to confine the debate to the banalities of law and order in rhetorical terms than the efficacy, or lack of, of our incarceration system and the deep scars it has left a generation and continues to.
We are therefore neither doing a good job in managing domestic issues nor are we doing a good job at protecting the order we have so carefully built over 80 plus years. What’s worse is we are not even having a serious debate about the real issues of the time. We are far too busy debating Trump’s theatrics and President Biden getting sandbagged.
This makes me think, are we rapidly becoming a country lost in frivolity?
If we want an escape from this froth and frivolity, we need a revolution. We need the participation of the youth in politics. Most of all, we need to open our minds, soak in reality and look past our tribalistic urges.
Jonan Ganesh asked that question about the UK in one of his editorial columns in the Financial Times. My instinctive response to his question was, who cares. As a mid-tier power in Europe, the UK being stuck on major issues and lost in frivolity doesn’t matter much. But, as the world’s largest economy and guarantor of the global order that ensures the free flow of trade and capital across the seven seas, we cannot afford to be lost in frivolity.
We are lost in frivolity because we have reduced the profile of a President to a commoner whom you can have a beer with. You couldn’t have a beer with Teddy Roosevelt or FDR or Lyndon Johnson. This erosion of how we want our President to be has ensured we have not had a visionary President since President Carter. President Obama never got a chance to be a visionary because he had to clean up after Bush’s disastrous eight years. When he tried to, he was blocked in the most visceral way possible by the Republicans in the House.
Congress over the years has been reduced to a house of Partisan Hacks given decades of surgical gerrymandering. No one cared about the issues in Congress – everyone, except a few in swing districts, is focused on appealing to the fringes on both the left and the right.
If we want an escape from this froth and frivolity, we need a revolution. We need the participation of the youth in politics. Most of all, we need to open our minds, soak in reality and look past our tribalistic urges.