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…what? I admit I don’t have a great model of the federal government in 1860, but this seems like an insane claim to me.
I can kind of see it. The Federal government in 1860 more than 10x'd itself in just a few years, going from spending $80 million a year in 1860 to spending $1.3 billion in 1865. Over the course of doing that it organized and prosecuted a Continental war against a peer competitor, successfully. Starting from almost nothing in terms of the scale of its military.
Could you see the US government of today suddenly spending $30-40 trillion and getting anything comparatively useful done? That's 'jumpstart space colonization' money and I'm skeptical we'd get 'Moon Dust for All' once all was said and done.
This may be semantics, but I'd say that's not a function of state capacity, but of "spare" (or "surplus" or "discretionary") state capacity. The feds went from spending a couple percent of GDP to spending 15%? Okay, but the main reason we can't start federally spending 15% today is because that would be the biggest budget cut in history!
It would be interesting to imagine how anyone would budget for a Civil War II footing under current conditions. Surely any separatists aren't going to honor the US' Federal debt, and I don't see how the loyalists even continue rolling it over without hyperinflation to de-facto default. At that point it's hard to imagine either side being extended any significant credit, so budgets would have to be actual receipts-meet-outlays budgets, and the cost of "we have to pay for the biggest war since WWII" would be on top of "and we can't keep running the huge deficits we've gotten used to for generations".
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