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It’s a dynamic process of empire building. Every government program has developed its own constituency that not only refuses to accept any cutbacks, but also demands expansion.

The primary cause of this pending fiscal crisis is that countless individual Americans, businesses, public employee unions, state governments, special interest groups and many others are engaged in a mad scramble for federal largesse from a bloated federal government that has grown way too big and is out of control like a runaway computer in a science fiction movie where no one remembers how or where to pull the plug. It doesn’t take an economist to know that this won’t end well. We are now spending much more than we are producing as a nation. In 1981, the federal debt was equal to 32% of GDP. Even more ominous than those raw numbers is the relationship of those figures to gross domestic product. It’s now over $31 trillion with no end in sight and nothing but more multitrillion-dollar deficits projected going forward.īut it gets worse. By the end of the 2000s, it had reached $12 trillion, thus doubling every decade. A biography as humane, learned, humorous and perceptive as this extends our knowledge of ourselves and where we came from, as well as painting an incomparable portrait of one of the sharpest and most sympathetic writers of all time' Hilary Spurling, ObserverĪ magisterial book by an eminent scholar of both European and American history, this will stand as the standard biography of Tocqueville for years to come.In the 1980s, the debt ceiling reached $3 trillion, and by the end of the 1990s, it was $6 trillion. 'One of the delights of this remarkable biography is to let its readers see the past as if it were the present, through the eyes of civilised Frenchmen like Tocqueville. In 1831 Tocqueville made the famous voyage to the United States which led to his masterpiece, Democracy in America, one of the most vital works in the history of democratic thought. As the son of a noble family which was nearly wiped out in the Revolution and as an ambitious politician during the July Monarchy and the Second Republic, Alexis de Tocqueville had a front seat at the revolutionary drama of his time.