SYDNEY - The dismantling of the United States as a normal, functional nation-state continues, the Sydney Morning Herald reported on Tuesday.

The gun neuralgia in the United States continues to worsen, and now new evidence has shown that its fiscal neuralgia -- a phobia for properly funded government -- is deepening too, said the Australian daily.

"American politics has become so fractious that stop-gaps, emergency funding and perpetual negotiations have kept the government lurching from crisis to crisis for a quarter-century," it said.

"This has now become the new normal," it added.