A future historian would describe the Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA) as having a profound effect on the United States. The BCA, he would write, was a critical step toward making America into a social democracy while ensuring its decline as a global military power. He would conclude that the law transformed the U.S. government into an entitlements agency that occasionally paved a road or killed a terrorist.

The historian would also note the irony. This was not, he would observe, what the BCA’s conservative supporters intended. But their undying devotion to the law’s spending caps, its mindless “sequestration” mechanism, and its singular focus on the shrinking of the “discretionary” portion of government spending, ensured that “mandatory” programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and income support grew unchecked while the brunt of spending cuts fell on America’s armed forces. The operation was a sort-of-success – the federal deficit didn’t rise quite so rapidly – but the patient died.