The real test for the republic

It’s always intimidating to write for a readership more clued up than you are. I file this on the very Tuesday the international commentariat have relentlessly claimed is the most consequential election day in American history. Now, in my ignorance, I suspect this superlative reflects the blinkered vanity of the present, and I’ve braved expressing my trust on the record that the country will ultimately survive either dismaying outcome. Yet only you know if an anti-climactic calm still prevails down thousands of American Main Streets; if, rather, the cities are aflame, armed militias reign, supermarket shelves are bare, and the US army is trying to decide which side to back; or if something in-between has manifested, including the freakishly unexpected.

I will take refuge in a rare certainty. Whichever substandard candidate ends up winning 2025’s booby prize, he or she will inherit the world’s most gorily red balance sheet, leading a country at least $36 trillion in the hole. Should his or her actual policies remotely resemble his or her campaign promises, the other rock-solid certainty is that the 47th American president will make the country’s humiliating national debt even worse. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, over ten years Kamala Harris’s plans would increase that debt by up to $8 trillion, while Donald Trump’s plans would entail additional borrowing of about twice that, so that by 2035 the USA would owe $52 trillion.

You’ve surely encountered those analogies that try to overcome the unfathomability of even $1 trillion by expressing the figuratively astronomical in literally astronomical terms. You know, such as: lined up end to end, a trillion dollar bills would almost reach the sun. But these pictorial mental games don’t work.