By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, August 24, 2026
There is much to love about Monaco. It is the single most
affluent country in the world, with the 38,087 very happy subjects of Prince
Albert II enjoying a GDP per capita of damn near $300,000, more than twice that
of rich little Switzerland and more than three times that of the United States,
which is by far the most affluent country with a population much larger than
that of greater Chicago. (But let’s not turn our noses up at rich countries
with low headcounts such as Norway, Ireland, or Singapore—small can be
beautiful.) There is no income tax in Monaco and the locals do not spend an
inordinate amount of time fighting over politics—there is an elected
parliament, but a good deal of the real power is wielded, generally lightly, by
the monarch, and the ruling Grimaldi dynasty has been running the show down on
that happy corner of the Riviera (with a few interruptions) since the late 13th
century. Sure, you can walk from one end of the principality to the other in a
half hour and could shove the whole thing into Central Park with room to spare,
but there is more to the Monegasque economy than Champagne corkage and yacht
moorage—there is even a small manufacturing sector producing cosmetics,
pharmaceuticals, and electronics. There is no poverty to speak of. Monaco does
not worry about losing people or capital to tax havens, having discovered the
best way to approach that problem: Be the tax haven.
There are downsides, I suppose: People
sometimes drive like madmen, and the traffic can be awfully loud. Prince
Albert probably hears a lot of jokes of the sort that make a man wince.
Albert II—Grace Kelly’s boy—went to Amherst, but it
doesn’t seem to have ruined him, and he competed in the Winter Olympics,
driving the bobsled. Being something of a traditionalist where monarchy is
concerned, he naturally has a few illegitimate children running around, which
had once complicated succession planning, but eventually he managed to produce
an heir with a wife, and the 11-year-old Marquis of Baux is a handsome little fellow.
I do not have much to say about hereditary monarchy other
than that it seems to me, a good republican, fundamentally ridiculous. What is
not ridiculous is Monaco’s debt-to-GDP ratio, which is 0.00 percent—about that,
I say, “Long live the House of Grimaldi!”
(Not “Long live the king!” The first prince of Monaco
adopted the title back when styling himself a king might have annoyed Louis
XIII of France, which would have been a problem.)
Donald Trump likes to think of himself as a kind of royal
figure: He plays around with kingly imagery and rhetoric, and then there’s all
that tacky gold leaf and the “What if we went back in time and didn’t outright murder
baby Hitler but switched him in the cradle with Liberace, instead?” aesthetic,
his attraction to the noble title “baron,” which provided the name both of his
youngest son (with a double-r) and “John Barron,” the imaginary friend Trump
invented to lie to the New York Post about his sex life. (Who among us
... ?) But the thing about being a monarch—a real monarch, not a figurehead—is
this: You have to take responsibility for stuff.
***
“We inherited this debt bomb from the Biden
administration,” J.D. Vance, vice president and knee-walking sycophant,
insisted during an appearance on a Newsmax program where someone called Carl Higbie pretends
to be a journalist. “American taxpayers are getting fleeced because of the very
high debt charges … very high debt charges that started under the Biden
administration. This is a crisis that we inherited. … The issue that we’ve had
under the Biden administration and what we’re still kind of dealing with is
that the debt was growing faster than American GDP.”
Mockery has followed, though neither Vance nor Higbie has
been mocked quite as much as he deserves.
Vance, who apparently has a taste for inversion, gets it
exactly upside down. The economy in fact grew more quickly than the debt did
during Biden’s term in office: When Joe Biden entered office (Q1 2021), debt
was 124 percent of GDP; when Biden left office (Q1 2025), debt was down to 121
percent of GDP. Joe Biden had more cause than Donald Trump has to make Vance’s
kind of complaint about his successor: When Donald Trump first entered office
(Q1 2017), debt was only 103 percent of GDP; by Q2 2020, debt was 133 percent
of GDP, and while debt pressure eased somewhat in the COVID recovery, it was
124 percent of GDP when Trump left office. But even before the dramatic COVID
spike, debt-to-GDP was headed the wrong way during the first Trump
administration. And it is headed the wrong way now: Debt was 121 percent of GDP
when Trump took office the second time around and is about 126
percent today according to the latest estimates. Some of those numbers can
be blamed on COVID, but much of it is just the usual stupid spending and
cowardly tax policy.
Vance’s argument is, of course, dishonest: This is J.D.
Vance we are talking about—of course it is dishonest. Vance is a man without
integrity who serves men who hold honesty and honor in contempt, and he is
nothing if not servile when it comes to his masters. But Vance’s argument is
also a stupid one, which maybe also should go without saying. American pundits’
and partisans’ favorite party game is pin-the-debt-on-the-president, but the
power to collect taxes, appropriate spending, and borrow money belongs to
Congress, not to the president. Republican members of Congress voted for a great deal of
spending while Biden was president. They had voted for a great deal of
spending, and for tax cuts, during the first Trump administration, too. And
then Republicans put together a gigantic—and gigantically
irresponsible—spending package in the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, for
which not one single solitary Democrat in Congress cast a vote. The Trump bill
added as much as $4.7 trillion to the debt through spending, through tax cuts,
and, according to analysts at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, by
contributing to higher interest rates on U.S. government debt—i.e.,
it is one cause of those “very high debt changes” that Vance is caterwauling
about.
The Democrats have been no great shakes when it comes to
fiscal probity. But to try to pretend that our current fiscal
situation—entitlement and discretionary spending, the tax code, interest
rates—is the result of Democratic actions taken during the Biden administration
is beyond dishonest. It is contemptuous. It is evidence that J.D. Vance
believes, possibly with good reason, that the people he is pinning his own
political hopes on are stupid—breathtakingly stupid, the sort of people who
couldn’t find their own asses with both hands and a map and who think that a manila folder is a Filipino contortionist.
Oh, but don’t worry, Vance assures us. The Trump
administration has … a plan!
“We actually do have a plan to get the economy growing
faster than the debt,” he told Newsmax.
Well.
***
Albert II was a space monkey. He was a rhesus macaque and
the first mammal to be launched into space. (Do not ask about poor Albert I,
who is remembered only as the first mammal launched on a rocket. RIP, would-be
space monkey.) Not to be confused with the reigning Monegasque monarch, Albert
II died on June 14, 1949, having survived his trip to space but not the
fall—from 83 miles—when his capsule’s parachute failed to open. (His heart and
respiratory rates were being recorded until the moment of impact, so if you are
wondering how fast a poor little monkey’s heart is beating as he falls out of
the sky at a terminal velocity of 300 mph or so, the data are on record,
somewhere.) Albert II experienced a few minutes of weightlessness, but, because
his capsule had no window, he did not have the opportunity to observe the Earth
from space or to see the stars blazing out there in the vasty deep, and, though
I cannot quite get into a monkey’s head in spite of decades of interacting with
politicians, I am confident saying that Albert II would not have understood
what he was seeing if he could have seen it.
The space monkey does not fly the rocket—he is only along
for the ride.
As Tom Wolfe tells the story in The Right Stuff,
the early astronauts insisted that windows be added to the spacecraft—because,
without a window, they wouldn’t be pilots: They would only be “spam in a
can,” as one of them put it. They would be space monkeys—generators of heart
rates and respiratory data, but, basically, meat. They were keenly aware that
the capsule originally had been designed for monkeys. Every time I hear a
politician or a pundit insist that they have a great plan to make the economy
do x, y, or z, I think about Albert II. At least that space monkey went to
space.
There are two ways to get the economy to grow faster than
the national debt: One is a faster-growing economy, the other is a
slower-growing debt. (An intelligent policy would pursue both.) Because the
real-world economy is dynamic and not subject to simple bookkeeping metrics,
there is some variability and unpredictability when it comes to reducing debt,
but the basic formula, generally reliable over time, is: 1) Tax more 2) Spend
less 3) Understand that the less you are willing to do of No. 1 the more you will
have to do of No. 2, and vice versa.
Reducing deficits is politically difficult and
economically complicated, but it is much more straightforward than achieving a
radical increase in real (meaning inflation-adjusted) economic growth to such
an extent that GDP growth makes deficit spending economically irrelevant. I
have been having this fight with my friends the naïve supply-siders for many
years. If there were a magic formula for getting a sustainable, big bump in
real GDP growth, then we would be doing that—the incentives for supporting such
a program, if it existed, would be entirely bipartisan. But the truth is,
nobody knows how to make that kind of growth happen. You may have heard me
rehearse my conversation with my old friend Larry Kudlow, who has for many
years been a leading voice among those arguing that we can simply grow our way
out of our fiscal problems. (Readers who have heard this before will forgive
the repetition, I hope.) Kudlow believes that there are reliable policies for
making that kind of growth happen: “I did it once, Kevin, and I can do it
again,” he told me, while insisting that I, on the other hand, am an
“eat-your-spinach guy.”
And so I’ll say it again: It’s time to eat your f---ing
spinach, guys. Forty trillion dollars is a lot of schmundo.
Kudlow served in the Reagan administration and in the
first Trump administration, and there was a good deal of good economic news
during both periods. But there most certainly was not the kind of real GDP
growth that enabled us to outrun our spending problems. The Trump numbers I
have noted above; in the Reagan years debt went from 31 percent of GDP in Q1
1981 to 50 percent of GDP in Q1 1989. Real GDP growth ran about 3.6 percent
during the Reagan years; debt went up faster because there was a larger decrease
in tax collections (from 19.1 percent of GDP in 1981 to 17.8 percent of GDP in
1989, a cut of 1.3 percentage points) than decrease in spending (from 21.6
percent of GDP in 1981 to 20.5 percent in 1989, a cut of 1.1 percentage
points). Hence, deficits went from 2.5 percent of GDP in 1981 to 2.7 percent of
GDP in 1989, with some relatively big deficits in between (5.9 percent in 1983,
4.7 percent in 1984, 5 percent in 1985, and 4.9 percent in 1986).
The Trump administration may or may not have a deficit
plan. It has been three weeks away from a healthcare plan for a decade now. But
say it does have a plan: Albert II probably had a plan for flying that space
capsule to the nearest banana plantation, but the space monkey does not fly the
rocket—and the president does not steer the economy. That is not how modern
economies work.
As it is, nearly 30 percent of all U.S. government
debt is the result of Trump-era policies and legislation signed into law by
one Donald J. Trump. Some planner. Some pilot.
Frankly, I’d be more inclined to trust a monkey—any
monkey, really, even though as a former resident of Delhi I have had some hairy
experiences with monkeys. At least a monkey is a straight shooter. The monkeys
have not yet proved themselves incompetent as a group, and I never have been
lied to by a monkey.
Americans cannot say as much for J.D. Vance or the
ghastly organ grinder holding his leash as he holds out his sad little fez for
tips. Trump thinks he is the kind of great man who can rule by royal decree,
but he is just another monkey strapped to a rocket he does not understand and
could not possibly control.
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