EDITORIAL : THE GUARDIAN, UK

       

US fiscal policy: In place of prudence

It is not about the right deficit for this year or next. It is about the need for a semblance of balance over the decades ahead

In Britain, deficit denial is a charge the right lays at the door of the left. Across the Atlantic, the term is being hurled by ratings agencies at Washington's newly divided government. Markets got the jitters on Monday after Standard & Poor's said, for the first time in 70 years of US bond watching, that it could soon cease to regard the sovereign IOUs of the world's sole superpower as copper-bottomed guarantees.

The gnomes of the ratings agencies have had a dire crisis. Long in hock to vested interests, they only saw the private crunch coming after it arrived. There is justified anger as they now sit in judgment over small and cash-strapped democracies. The US, however, is a different matter. The planet regards its bonds as the safest of financial harbours, and no second-rater in any agency could transform this perception on his own. S&P's verdict hit home because it reflects what any Washington watcher can see. The US has grown keener on spending than paying its taxes, and is saddled with a political economy that punishes leaders who try to bring the two things back into line. The point here is not about the right deficit for this year or next, or the valuable role of pump-priming in a slump. It is rather about the need for a semblance of balance over the decades ahead.

The irony is that the starting point is not dire. The lapsing of Bush-era tax cuts, which were legislated to be temporary, and the rise in taxable incomes once prosperity returns would have done much of the work automatically, if they had been allowed to take their course. Instead, the debate has been framed by Paul Ryan, Republican chair of the House budget committee, who is bent on pushing all of the pain on to the expenditure side while actually cutting taxes. This would be fantastically hard in any ageing society, since the only pressure on the pensions bill is upward. It is doubly hard to achieve in the US, which is obliged to foot the runaway costs of marketised healthcare for the elderly. Without change, that burden would more than double as a share of GDP.

Mr Ryan's solution is to shred the medical safety net for the old. The social effects would be dire, and potentially compounded by derailment of Barack Obama's reforms that would put a lid on the costs. What matters for the deficit, though, is whether it is politically sellable. In a nation with the patchiest and priciest medicines in the rich world, that seems most unlikely.

If a failure to face up to the need to raise taxes is coupled to a failure to devise credible savings, the US will sleepwalk into a spiral in which debt interest gobbles up ever more of its resources. This disaster could still be averted, but with a check or balance in the way of every tax rise, it can no longer be ruled out.

Libya: Mission creak

With boots already on the ground, Nato's military involvement in the civil war in Libya is deepening step by step

The 20 British and French military advisers being sent to help the rebels in Benghazi do not constitute an occupation force. They are advisers rather than trainers, but they are boots on the ground. With every step being taken by those boots, Nato's military involvement in the civil war in Libya is deepening. Just as significant was the extension of Nato's target list to include Gaddafi's telephone exchanges and small satellite communications systems, which have ominously been labelled dual-use. The announcements in London and Brussels yesterday were the third shift since the UN resolution authorised a no-fly zone over Libya. The others were the decision to send body armour to the rebels, and Barack Obama putting his name to a letter which said there was no future for Libya with Gaddafi in power. The war aims, which Mr Obama had earlier vowed would not be broadened to include regime change, had just got broader.

Each step has fuelled fears of mission creep, although, as one observer said yesterday, preventing the mission from collapsing altogether may be closer to the mark. Each of these steps is cumulative, and the direction of travel should concern us all. A month ago it appeared to some that Gaddafi's forces would fold like a pack of cards shortly after the first Tomahawks flew over. However, in many instances the opposite has happened. They have adapted to the urban battlefield, hidden their heavy weapons underground, put snipers on the rooftops of Misrata and shelled rebel-held areas with cluster bombs. Their missile launchers are no longer sitting ducks. Nato officials said yesterday that strikes on a communications centre of Gaddafi's crack 32nd brigade had reduced the regime's ability to direct its forces on Brega and Ajdabiya. But at the same time they had to admit that strikes such as these had little effect on the street-to-street fighting in Misrata, which the Canadian commander of the air campaign, Lieutenant-General Charles Bouchard, likened to a knife fight in a phone booth – it was difficult to get into the middle of it. In other words, an intervention conducted in the name of protecting civilian life in Benghazi may have had the opposite effect in Misrata, Ras Lanuf, Brega and Ajdabiya.

Misrata could well become the turning point. It is the place where the aims of protecting the lives of non-combatants and advancing the war aims of one set of combatants have become fused and are now indistinguishable from one another. As the fighting continues, the symbolic effect of Nato's moves has also diminished. A month ago they might have been catalysts to those around Gaddafi who had no wish to be on the losing side. But today their psychological effect is not so obvious. Gaddafi is hardly quaking in his boots. If he were, his forces might have disengaged. Instead the fighting is spreading, and he may think he still has every hope of capturing Misrata. If that were to happen, he would have stopped the armed rebellion in its tracks.

There are now two options: digging in for the long haul in the expectation that the rebels will one day become a fighting force. This would mean that the steps we saw yesterday would not be the last, as Nato ratchets up its presence in the air and on the ground. The second option is to go back to pursuing a diplomatic initiative of the type proposed by the African Union or Turkey. As the balance of power now stands, one or other of the Gaddafi clan might well remain in power. Neither option is appealing, but from the logic of the UN resolution it is surely the second route that would stop the suffering of civilians sooner. To the rebels in Benghazi, Gaddafi's son Saif has shed his role as the public face of human rights reform. He has become as unacceptable as any other member of the Gaddafi clan. And yet in the absence of the collapse of the regime, he may end up as the face diplomats have to deal with.

In praise of … the M1

The spine of England and a seemingly unavoidable element of any road journey between north and south

The M1  is one of those bits of Britain that everyone knows but nobody likes. Details of its route must be lodged in the minds of a very large proportion of the population, a national unifier in dreary grey concrete. Route 66 it isn't. There's no joy in driving the M1's full length, unless your destination is a happy one, but the sight of things such as the radio masts at Daventry or the point, by junction 19, where the lights are replaced by darkness are memories most people share. So are the endless roadworks – currently under way along its length in Barnsley, Buckinghamshire and Barnet, where last week's fire pushed the road, unexpectedly, into the news bulletins. But then the M1 is only ever noticed when things go wrong on it. It lacks even the debatable beauty of more elegant bits of the motorway network – the Chilterns cutting on the M40, the Shap moorlands on the M6, and the farmhouse trapped between the carriageways high on the M62. None of these roads matter as much as the M1, the spine of England and a seemingly unavoidable element of any road journey between north and south. It has been woven unnoticed into all sorts of lives since the first section opened, in 1959. At the start of the Beatles' 1965 tour, George Harrison's guitar fell off the roof of his Austin Princess on to the M1. Maybe somewhere, in some lost corner of the central reservation, the bits are still there: the M1 can be horrible, dangerous, ugly – but above all it is an unloved national lifeline.