All of this is particularly troubling given the enormous sums of money involved in the Swachh Bharat Mission. In its first report on the campaign, in November 2014, the World Bank said that “over the 1999-2013 period,” India’s central and state governments “are reported to have expended INR 150 billion (USD2.4 billion)”—that is, Rs 15,000 crore. By all accounts, much of that money was wasted. The Swachh Bharat Mission proposes to spend around 15 times that in just five years.

A 2014 report by the institute, based on a survey of “sanitation quality, use, access and trends,” found that “over 40% of households with a working latrine have at least one member who defecates in the open,” and that many respondents believed there are benefits to defecating in the open. The report emphasised that latrine construction alone is not enough to change open-defecation patterns, and that “If the government were to build a latrine for every rural household without one, without changing sanitation preferences, most people in our sample states where it is most common would still defecate in the open.”

The only clear change in the life of the settlement since the launch of the Swachh Bharat Mission, Choudhary told me, was that the incidence of malaria and dengue had gone up here since a trash-processing project was built in the vicinity as part of the campaign.

Right at the foot of the mountain of garbage is the Muslim ghetto of Bombay Hotel. The ghetto includes the settlement of Citizen Nagar, home to people permanently displaced by the 2002 anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat. On paper, Citizen Nagar simply does not exist. The state government refuses to recognise the existence of settlements of pogrom survivors, and insists that all of them have returned to their original homes.

I think it is likely that by 2030, the discretionary portions of the budget will disappear. This means that politics will be all sound and fury, signifying almost nothing. It will be about who is appointed to the Supreme Court. It will have to do with issues of free speech and rights of non-cooperation. It will be all hat and no cattle.

By the time the Democrats can get back into the White House in 2022, it will be too late for the incoming President to have any effect on federal spending. Yet politics is all about special-interest groups getting their hands into the federal till. Political promises are made to these special-interest groups, but the absence of discretionary components in the federal debt will prevent almost all of these promises from being fulfilled. For all intents and purposes, national politics will be decided in terms of debates over social issues that have no budgetary consequences. All the rest of politics will simply be political rhetoric: sound and fury, signifying nothing.

The welfare state works only as long as the government can get its hands on other people's money. There are serious limits politically on the ability of the federal government collect taxes from the public. That limit is about 20% of GNP. The increase in nondiscretionary spending in the federal budget is going to place the welfare state in a straitjacket. This is good news in general. There is no way that America can grow its way out of the straitjacket. But the straitjacket is limited by the enforcement of federal laws, and without money for enforcement, Americans are going to get out of the federal straitjacket. I won't live long enough to see it, but maybe you will.