Budgetary Infinity

The vast (and ever-expanding) scale of the economic crisis.

Describing the “feeling of audacity” among America’s rulers during the current financial meltdown, David Brooks noted:

Zeros have lost their meanings. The amount of consideration once devoted to a proposal costing $3 billion is now devoted to a proposal costing $300 billion. Americans have entered the age of budgetary infinity. …

Something has been revealed about the psychology of the nation’s capital. When investors in New York become gripped by fear, they pull inward. When Washingtonians are gripped by fear, they rush outward, with bigger and more daring plans. The risk tolerance in the financial world has shrunk to zero, but the risk tolerance in the political world has risen to infinity.

(In November 1975, in an article on the painful process of creating a Presidential library for John F. Kennedy, The New York Times described “an endless parade of arbitrary, individual Presidential memorials tied incongruously to research facilities and maintained at Federal expense into numbing budgetary infinity.”)