Over-determined

The US government shutdown, now rapidly being subsumed into the much more serious wrangle about increasing the debt ceiling, shows no sign of ending any time soon.  President Obama clearly regrets allowing the debt ceiling to become the centerpiece of innumerable fiscal disputes in his first term, and is refusing to negotiate on the issue at all.  Republicans are determined to use the leverage that they feel the looming US default gives them to drive a hard bargain on the future direction of fiscal policy.  "Obamacare", the proximate cause of the shutdown, has faded into the background, as most senior Republicans seem willing to admit that prospects for its repeal are non-existent.

Most economists and media commentators realize that the debt ceiling is far more trouble than it's worth, which is why it's an unknown concept outside the United States.  It's likely that most politicians on both sides of the debate (the tea party types probably excluded) know this too.  The fact is that trying to set a debt ceiling separately from spending and taxation decisions makes for a mathematically over-determined system.

In simplified form, there are three variables in play: taxation, spending and the deficit (financing of which results in the government's debt).  You can decide how much you want to spend and how much tax you want to raise, and then the deficit (and addition to debt) follows mechanistically.  Or you can decide how much of a deficit you are prepared to tolerate and how much taxation you want to raise, and those two figures will determine how much you can spend.  You can't determine all three things independently, yet that's what the debt ceiling attempts to do.

Most of the time, Congress has understood this and has basically waved through increases in the debt ceiling. However, the Republicans are running up a nasty little track record of using it to make the lives of Democratic Presidents difficult.  Newt Gingrich did it to Bill Clinton back in the 1990s, and now John Boehner, egged on by the tea partiers, is doing it to Barack Obama.

In a sensible world, the GOP and the Dems would probably agree to do away with the debt ceiling altogether -- and indeed, Matt Yglesias at Slate has argued that the Democrats should be seeking exactly that, as part of their price for ending the current impasse.  Chances of that happening seem infinitesimally small, and in this frankly scary article, Yglesias offers us a theory as to why that may be so, and why gridlock in Washington is likely to get worse, not better.

As Yglesias relates,  a Yale political science professor, Juan Linz, concluded after researching governance in a wide variety of countries that the US system is fundamentally flawed.  Successful democracies have governments headed by elected first ministers, with the President as a largely titular head of state.  In the US,  by contrast, both the President and the Congress can claim popular mandates to govern.  As long as ideological differences among the main parties were fuzzy, this system could function with only occasional disruption.  However, as the two main parties have become ever more ideologically distinct in recent years, willingness to compromise has shrunk alarmingly.

Linz, who died just last week, had come to regard the US system of government as a failure.  And as Yglesias concludes, "That's very bad news for America, and nobody knows how to stop it".