No way to run a government

“Americans can rarely have held their politicians in greater contempt—and rightly so,” said Rupert Cornwell in The Independent (U.K.). The agreement between Congress and the White House that pulled the country back from the so-called fiscal cliff is “no more than a feeble, last-ditch palliative.” It staves off calamity for a mere two months, at which point the once-great country hits its debt ceiling and the bickering begins again. American lawmakers cannot perform the most basic task of government: setting a budget. Some observers have “glibly asserted” that the Founding Fathers intended for Congress to check the power of the president when they divided government into separate branches. But surely Washington, Jefferson, and the rest “could never have imagined so colossal a collective abdication of responsibility by the people’s elected representatives.” By now it is obvious to the whole world that “the greatest enemy of American growth is the dysfunctional American political system.”

The U.S. system used to work just fine, said Daniel Haufler in the Frankfurter Rundschau (Germany). But now that one party has become “completely pigheaded,” nothing can get done. “Ever since they lost communism as an ideological punching bag, the Republicans have launched themselves against an imaginary enemy in Washington.” They don’t simply want lower taxes; they want to starve the government of sufficient revenue—in effect, to dismantle the country’s safety net. In this ongoing power struggle, the U.S. is likely to default—panicking world markets and dragging the rest of us into another global economic downturn.

It’s easy to curse “these damn Yankees,” said Olaf Gersemann in Die Welt (Germany). They can’t come up with a compromise, even when their entire economy is at stake, because their political system encourages ideological polarization among the voters. Their elections only rarely deliver a workable legislative majority. But let’s not forget that this kind of crisis, in which the U.S. system reveals its biggest weakness, is also extremely rare. Under normal circumstances, American political paralysis is a feature, not a bug. The Founding Fathers knew that divided government “is the only way to tame the executive and the legislature” and avoid tyranny. We Germans, who are watching the EU morph into a kind of overlord that wants to take our taxpayers’ money and give it to other countries, “understand how wise that was.” Let’s not forget that America’s system made it the world’s richest nation, and nothing will change that soon—not even a steady diet of political acrimony and budgetary crises.

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The Americans may be ruled by idiots, but who isn’t? asked Leo McKinstry in Express.co.uk. “America is hardly unique in the mix of cowardice and self-satisfaction that characterizes its political class.” The EU is no better. It too is stuck in “a cycle of repeated crises and bogus resolutions.” Every few months we hold some grand summit whose mission is to save the euro and sort out our currency troubles. Each time we wind up with another short-term bailout that postpones a larger reckoning. The problem is the same on both sides of the Atlantic. Most politicians are concerned with keeping power, not governing. Their narrow, self-serving outlook “is a tragedy for us all.”