A downgrade isn’t catastrophic because global financial markets decide the creditworthiness of U.S. securities, not Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s. The good news is that investors still regard Treasury bonds, which carry the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, as a near zero-risk investment. But a downgrade will raise the cost of credit, especially for states and institutions whose debt is pegged to Treasurys. Above all a downgrade is a symbol of fiscal mismanagement and an omen of worse to come if we continue the same habits.

President Obama will deserve much of the blame for the spending blowout of his first two years (see the nearby chart). But the origins of this downgrade go back decades, and so this is a good time to review the policies that brought us to this sad chapter and $14.3 trillion of debt.

FDR began the entitlement era with the New Deal and Social Security, but for decades it remained relatively limited. Spending fell dramatically after the end of World War II and the U.S. debt burden fell rapidly from 100% of GDP. That changed in the mid-1960s with LBJ’s Great Society and the dawn of the health-care state. Medicare and Medicaid were launched in 1965 with fairy tale estimates of future costs.

Medicare, the program for the elderly, was supposed to cost $12 billion by 1990 but instead spent $110 billion. The costs of Medicaid, the program for the poor, have exploded as politicians like California Democrat Henry Waxman expanded eligibility and coverage. In inflation-adjusted dollars, Medicaid cost $4 billion in 1966, $41 billion in 1986 and $243 billion last year. Rather than bending the cost curve down, the government as third-party payer led to a medical price spiral.

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Moody’s and the boys are citing the risk of a default on August 2 as the proximate reason for their warning. But Americans should understand that the debt ceiling is merely the trigger. The gun is the spending boom of the last three years and the prospect that Washington lacks the political will to reduce it in the years to come.

On spending, it is important to recall how extraordinary the blowout of the last three years has been. We’ve seen nothing like it since World War II. Nothing close. The nearby chart tracks federal outlays as a share of GDP since 1960. The early peaks coincide with the rise of the Great Society, the recession of 1974-75, and then a high of 23.5% with the recession of 1982 and the Reagan defense buildup.

From there, spending declines, most rapidly during the 1990s as defense outlays fell to 3% of GDP in 2000 from its Reagan peak of 6.2% in 1986. The early George W. Bush years saw spending bounce up to a plateau of roughly 20% of GDP, but no more than 20.7% as recently as 2008.

Then came the Obama blowout, in league with Nancy Pelosi’s Congress. With the recession as a rationale, Democrats consciously blew up the national balance sheet, lifting federal outlays to 25% in 2009, the highest level since 1945. (Even in 1946, with millions still in the military, spending was only 24.8% of GDP. In 1947 it fell to 14.8%.) Though the recession ended in June 2009, spending in 2010 stayed high at nearly 24%, and this year it is heading back toward 25%.

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In 1978, with the British economy in crisis and unemployment hovering at 1.5 million, or 5.1% of the working-age population, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party turned to its advertising gurus, Charles and Maurice Saatchi, to ram home the message that the socialist policies of the Labour government had failed. With garbage piling up in the streets due to public-sector trade union strikes, inflation rates of 24.2% in 1976 and 15.8% in 1977, and a sense of permanent, structural malaise settling over the nation, the Saatchis produced an iconic poster of a long dole line tailing off into the distance, under the message: “Labour Isn’t Working.”

The prime minister, James Callaghan, complained about the poster in parliament, and the chancellor of the exchequer, Denis Healy, complained about the Tories “selling politics like soap powder.” That guaranteed the poster further publicity, and the following year Mrs. Thatcher won the general election, a victory that the Conservative Party treasurer, Lord Thorneycroft, put down to the poster.

And now, three decades later, Mitt Romney has adapted the same image (with full attribution) for his campaign. “Obama Isn’t Working,” declares Mr. Romney’s poster.

The former Massachusetts governor is right to try to make unemployment the central campaign issue. No American president since Franklin Roosevelt has been re-elected with an unemployment rate higher than 7.2%, and the current rate is 9.1%. If one then adds the 2.5 million people who have been out of a job for so long that they are no longer looking for work, and the 8.7 million who are making do with part-time work but want full-time jobs, then that rate rises to a lamentable 16.5%. Small wonder, then, that Mr. Romney has turned to the stark visual image championed by the Thatcherites as he seeks to blame the president for the long dole lines. (more…)

Had the U.S. economy recovered from the current recession the way it bounced back from the other 10 recessions since World War II, our per-capita gross domestic product (GDP) would be $3,553 higher than it is today, and 11.9 million more Americans would be employed.

Those startling figures are based on the average recovery rate of real GDP and jobs three years after the beginning of each postwar recession. Some apologists suggest that the current recovery is so weak because the recession was so deep. But the totality of our experience in the postwar period is exactly the opposite—the bigger the bust, the bigger the boom that follows.

On average, three years after the four deepest previous recessions started, real GDP was 7.6% higher than the pre-recession level. During the Obama recovery, real GDP is up only 0.1%. Forty months after the start of the 1953, 1957, 1973 and 1981 recessions, total employment was on average 4.7% higher than the pre-recession peaks, while total employment today is still down 4.7%—that’s a total employment gap of 13.9 million jobs.

The problem is not just the weak recovery but increasing evidence that the economy is now on a growth path far different from the previous quarter century. Despite the largest monetary and fiscal stimuli in American history, in 2009 the capital stock of the nation actually shrank for the first time in the postwar period. Our current economic underperformance seems so likely to continue that many economists and pundits have difficulty visualizing an America of tomorrow that looks like the America of the past half-century.

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