Who actually said it? We don’t know for sure, but what was said rings true. And it seems more true now than ever.
It’s a quote about democracy that has been attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville, the French diplomat who described democracy in America during the early 1800s. More likely, however, the quote originated with Alexander Fraser Tytler, a Scottish historian, in the late 1700s. Whoever said it, and whenever it was said, it seems to describe what we’re seeing in our country today.
Here it is, updated in more modern language:
“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.”
Why did I dig up that quote from years ago? If you look around, the answer seems obvious. The American people have discovered that generous gifts, commonly called benefits and programs, are available from their government if elected officials choose to provide them. So voters make sure to elect officials who will do so. By the way, this also includes electing officials who promise not to take as much of the public’s income in taxes.
So now we have a U.S. government that is sending tremendous amounts of financial benefits to Americans while taking in much less through taxes. The national debt surpassed $40 trillion last week. That’s a trillion dollars, not a million and not even a billion.
We know the national debt is huge, but how much is a trillion dollars? Let’s put it into terms we can relate to. If your salary were $40,000 a year, it would take 25 years to earn $1 million. At that same salary, it would take 25,000 years to earn $1 billion. And it would take 25 million years to earn $1 trillion.
How much is a trillion dollars? Let’s try a more visual example. A stack of $1 bills totaling $1 trillion would reach about 67,000 miles high. By that measure, $17 trillion in stacked $1 bills would extend more than 1 million miles, enough to stretch from Earth to the moon four times and still have money left over.
Although the Republican Party once complained loudly about the national debt, both political parties have contributed to rising annual deficits. The debt began growing rapidly during the Reagan administration because of increased government spending, particularly on the military, along with tax cuts that helped boost the economy following the Carter years. The debt has continued to climb under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
And it continues to grow at an alarming pace. The national debt increased from about $10 trillion in 2009 to more than $40 trillion today, with debt growth occurring under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
There may be politicians in Washington who have never read the quote about democracy that I shared earlier in this column. But they understand that uncontrolled spending eventually leads to trouble. So why do they keep spending and do little to control the spiraling national debt?
It’s simple. We, the voters, don’t want them to, and we would probably vote many of them out of office if they tried.
Maybe a Bible verse better explains the times we’re living in. It’s 2 Timothy 4:3-4, from the New King James Version, with a little help from the Mac’s Amplified Version:
“For the time will come (and it has come) when they (most American voters) will not endure sound doctrine (about economics), but according to their own desires (and greed), because they have itching ears (want the easy way out), they will heap up for themselves teachers (politicians); and they will turn their ears away (won’t listen to common sense) from the truth (that debt must be paid, or the credibility of the debtor becomes useless), and be turned aside to fables (that deficits don’t matter).”
By the way, Tytler also wrote that history has shown a democracy seldom lasts more than 200 years for the reasons mentioned above. If that’s true, then by my calculation, the United States may already be on borrowed time.