America's new free-lunch politics

Combine that bracing experience with the rise of new heterodox ideas in macroeconomics, the proliferation of social media, and a pandemic plunging much of the locked-down country even deeper into online life — and we're left with a world that has come to seem more "symbolic" than ever before, and more amenable to manipulation by planners of all kinds. With champions of Modern Monetary Theory, a Universal Basic Income, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies all jostling about and rubbing shoulders on Twitter and digital news sites with a political flim-flam man in the White House spewing lies like Old Faithful and willing to try anything, everything, and their reverse six times by supper in order to gain an advantage over his enemies, many found themselves through 2020 swept up by a sense of infinite possibility. The result has been a sea-change in thinking about what government can do. A Republican president and a divided Congress enacted roughly $3 trillion in pandemic relief in 2020, and they did so without any talk of tax hikes or budget cuts to cover the cost. Just a few weeks later, a Democratic president and Congress approved another $1.9 trillion in relief, bringing the 12-month total to roughly $5 trillion. This has been followed by more head-spinning numbers from Joe Biden: a $1.5 trillion nondefense domestic spending proposal (which represents a huge 16 percent increase over this year), plus another $2.3 trillion for infrastructure (broadly defined) and $1.8 trillion for a range of new social programs. It would be wrong to suggest that the emerging consensus rejects any thought about limits at all. It's just that both parties now appear to believe that those limits are much further out than we've traditionally believed. Exactly where isn't clear — and that's a scary thought. But until we stumble on those limits, it's free lunches for everyone.