The Long Now, Pt. 4 - Snip!

For two decades, the relationship between what government collects in taxes and what it spends has been deliberately severed. The tether that once connected these two functions has frayed so completely that taxation and spending now operate as entirely separate political tools. The consequences of this disconnection are only beginning to materialize, and the institutions insisting this separation is sustainable are about to discover what happens when the bedrock assumptions of fiscal reality no longer apply.

•        Words have been quietly redefined to mean whatever serves power. "War" no longer includes drone strikes and missile campaigns conducted daily across the globe. "Capitalism" now refers exclusively to asset price inflation, not productive investment or risk-taking. When the meaning of language shifts without debate, so does the meaning of reality itself.

•        The severing wasn't sudden or partisan, it was methodical. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have steadily dismantled the concept that taxes fund spending. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was the final cut, leveraging the entire country the way a private equity firm levers a company, distributing windfalls to corporations and the wealthy without reducing a single dollar of government spending.

•        Taxation and spending have become pure instruments of political power. Republicans use tax cuts to reward corporations and boost stock prices. Democrats propose wealth taxes framed as moral punishment, not fiscal necessity. Neither side pretends anymore that these mechanisms exist to balance a budget or fund government services.

•        The same corporate beneficiaries profit regardless of which party controls the levers. Whether the next administration calls their spending plan "Infrastructure Bonds" or "Green Bonds," the outcomes will be identical. The Fed will monetize at least half of the issuance. The multinational corporations dominating capital markets will pocket the gains. The mechanism changes its costume but not its function.

•        If taxes and spending operate independently of each other, what happens to the concept of fiscal constraint itself? Once that constraint dissolves entirely, both become pure expressions of whose vision of justice, equity, and retribution will be imposed. And whoever controls that definition controls the future.