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The American Paradox or Monsieur Purgon’s Presprictions
The American Paradox or Monsieur Purgon’s Presprictions.
By
Jamel
BENJEMIA
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There are nations, as there are men, who prefer fables to diagnoses, fiction to truth. Contemporary America, proud and vain like a character from Molière, gazes into the distorted mirror of its own illusions, adorned with the tawdry regalia of success, even as its economic heart beats out of rhythm, to a broken cadence. « The One Big Beautiful Bill Act »— the OBBB Act — is not a reform, but a curtsy, a theatrical gesture dressed up as fiscal order. The latest grandiloquent scene in a feverish political theatre.
Trump, returning like Harpagon on the campaign trail, resurrects his tax obsessions in a gesture paved with contradictions and indulgence. On July 1st, 2025, the U.S. Senate passed this monumental piece of legislation under the solemn airs of a victorious fanfare. Two days later, the House of Representatives confirmed the decision, and Donald Trump signed the bill into law on July 4th — a day heavy with symbolism in the American calendar. Yet behind the red curtain and beneath the stage lights, a far graver play is being performed: the tragedy of a nation which, having renounced moderation, defies the laws of fiscal gravity with the heedlessness of a child walking a tightrope with no safety net.
A Prescription Without Diagnosis
Everything here is posture and imposture. Despite its lofty pretensions, the OBBB Act is little more than a repackaged sequel to the tax cuts of Trump’s first term. Some see in it a strategy for growth, but in truth it is an expedient, a political sleight of hand whose perverse effects are as insidious as Monsieur Purgon’s prescriptions — soothing the symptoms while worsening the disease in the silence of the organs. In other words, the very tax reductions meant to cure the imbalance merely deepen it.
The budget deficit already stands at a staggering 6.7% of GDP — an alarming figure for an economy not yet fully in recession. And still, rather than pursue the difficult path of adjustment, America deepens the furrow of a public debt that will soon, without shame or alarm, surpass 106% of GDP — a threshold reached only during the Second World War.
The Poor Pay, the Rich Collect
Let us not be deceived: the illness is not merely arithmetic — it is moral and structural. By reducing the tax burden on the elderly, gutting Medicaid, and offering fleeting tax « bouses » to workers in the form of trivial exemptions, a whole social model is being dismembered in the name of short-termism.
Twelve million Americans stand to lose health coverage, when combining those excluded from Medicaid with those affected by modifications to the Affordable Care Act. And as if this weren’t enough, a new protectionist deluge looms on the horizon. Starting August 1st, 2025, a fresh avalanche of tariffs will descend on imports — a mercantilist flourish in search of spectacle. These are no longer mere taxes, but commercial war banners, brandished as electoral totems.
As in Molière’s comedies, where social hypocrisy dresses itself in cardinal virtues, the OBBB Act simulates discipline while institutionalizing waste. It is Tartuffe cloaked in the Stars and Stripes, invoking fiscal balance while worshipping the idols of electoral largesse. Under the guise of budgetary realism, Republicans tighten the belt on the poor while loosening it for the rich. Clean energy is dismissed, the working class subjected to bureaucratic gymnastics to prove their poverty, and fossil wealth steps forth as a savior, greeted with applause.
The Art of Turning One’s Back on the Future
One might wonder at such short-sightedness. But one must understand contemporary America as a patient in denial — a comic-opera Diafoirus prescribing bleedings and enemas to a body already drained. Future growth is summoned like a deus ex machina. Miracles are expected: a fiscal manna that will erase deficits without reform, a Keynesian blessing without discipline or sacrifice.
This growth mirage is all the more deceitful because it is held aloft by the very people who yesterday scorned the welfare state. Today, it is the markets that must save America, the stock exchange that must sustain the debt, consumption that must serve as collective anaesthetic — keeping alive the illusion of prosperity under artificial respiration. But as inflation rumbles and interest rates rise, the entire house of cards trembles.
America, as embodied in this law, suffers from a deeper vice: it has lost its sense of the future. It acts like a sleepwalker, trampling the red lines of sustainability without even realising it. Its economic program is a succession of fiscal gadgets — from tip tax credits to the wholesale abandonment of any serious decarbonisation strategy. Technological ambition, artificial intelligence, those voracious data centers — all cry out for a new, robust, inventive energy vision. And yet, the American administration doubles down on coal, fracked gas, the past as prologue.
This is no longer boldness, but the reduction of complexity to slogans. The populist mind, when allowed to govern for too long, simplifies the world until it disappears.
Deferred Austerity
Economists, bankers, analysts have issued their warnings: if the U.S. continues on this path for a decade, it will have to either cut spending or raise taxes by 5.5% of GDP annually. This is Greek-style austerity on a gargantuan scale — a shock therapy for a colossus with feet of clay, one who believes himself Hercules but already sways like Argan, the legendary hypochondriac.
As so often in Molière, tragedy creeps in when the theatre refuses truth. America today is that Imaginary Invalid who summons experts to examine his ankle, while gangrene spreads in his chest. The parliamentary committees, the Senate commissions, the court economists — all repeat the same diagnoses. None can wake the beast from its fiscal slumber.
Behind the scenes, the real audience waits: bond markets, global finance, credit rating agencies. These are tomorrow’s spectators, and already their indulgence is wearing thin. If the promised growth fails to materialise, if interest rates climb further, if the dollar continues to falter, then the play will turn to tragedy. The fiscal dream will become a sovereign nightmare. The debt, now ethereal, will become ironclad.
And America — like in the final act of a twilight Molière — will learn that illusion cannot forever stand in for policy.
Power or pantomime ?
It is not too soon to revisit the classics. For what is this power that claims to embody progress, while rejecting the efforts required to sustain it? What is this democracy that waves the banner of liberty while tying itself to the most archaic logic of fossil rent? Trumpist America, with its promises of comfort without responsibility, of greatness without gravity, is uncannily close to a character from Molière: vain, spendthrift, and fiercely attached to its ignorance.
And yet, perhaps fiction holds the cure — not to escape it, but to reflect through it. As Cléante reminds us in Tartuffe, wilful blindness is the gravest of faults. Or, as an Arab proverb puts it, « the camel sees not its own hump. » Such is the American paradox: an empire lucid about the world, yet blind to itself.
In playing comedy too long, America may one day remove the mask — and find, in the mirror, only the hollow echo of its own fables.
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