The U.S. now has an economy shifted too much toward consumption, debt and imports and too little toward production, innovation and exports. It now has a mounting federal debt that creates present indulgence and future hardship.
Americans could once be confident that their country would grow more productive because each generation was more skilled than the last. That’s no longer true. The political system now groans to pass anything easy ”” tax cuts and expanding health care coverage ”” and is incapable of passing anything hard ”” spending restraint, health care cost control.
The standard thing these days is for Americans to scold each other for our profligacy, to urge fiscal Puritanism. But it’s not clear Americans have ever really been self-disciplined. Instead, Americans probably postponed gratification because they thought the future was a big rock-candy mountain, and if they were stealing from that, they were robbing themselves of something stupendous.
It would be nice if some leader could induce the country to salivate for the future again. That would mean connecting discrete policies ”” education, technological innovation, funding for basic research ”” into a single long-term narrative.
Here is a novel idea. Why not let’s try following the US Constitution. Let’s do away with all the extra Constitutional excesses that leach our finances and destroy our productivity. Let’s do away with the Department of Education entirely. Can anyone argue with a straight face that public education has improved since the founding of the Department of Education in 1979? Surely, we can eliminate large swaths of onerous government bureaucracies without harm to our nation, and in fact, great improvement.
Let’s do away with Federal Reserve Notes and the entire Federal Reserve system of private banks that can charge the taxpayer up to 6% to print their fiat paper “money”. The Federal Reserve was supposed to regulate the “boom & bust” business cycles. The Federal Reserve system failed to prevent the Great Depression, failed to prevent the stagflation of the 1970s with it’s Misery Index, failed to prevent the Dot Com bust, failed to prevent the housing market collapse, and failed to prevent the current deep recession with it’s actual unemployment rate of about 20%. Why not let us follow the Constitution, that gives congress the sole power to create money, and actually have the US Mint make our money again.
Let’s get out of the nation building and world policeman business. The oceans are large barriers and we have ballistic nuclear missiles. We have an armed and well regulated militia here at home. Surely, our current “defense” is in reality a projection of our power around the globe rather than an actual defense. Let us give notice and withdraw from NATO and SEATO and all the other entangling alliances that George Washington warned us against.
Let us also withdraw from NAFTA and GATT. Ross Perot never spoke a truer word than when he said of NAFTA that we would hear the giant sucking sound of US jobs going over seas. Our manufacturing base has been reduced by 80% since the passage of these treaties…treaties that gave away our sovereignty and destroyed our industry in uneven playing fields around the globe. Let us give the world our 6 month notice and withdraw from these ill conceived treaties.
We should honestly consider abolishing the IRS and the personal income tax. That system was created in 1913. We existed and profited without an income tax for well over a century. We can do so again. If government were modest, rather than the gigantic centralized monster that it is now, we could easily finance it with other taxes. In fact, individual income tax provides only 45% of the federal government’s current revenue. More than half of the money that the federal government gets is NOT from income taxes…right now. The Income Tax code is about 66,000 pages right now. I think that that is insane. Even a flat tax would be better and we could recoup billions in lost productivity if we were not saddled with 66,000 pages of personal income tax regulations.
Social Security is not tenable. It was a ponzi scheme from the start and one that lured the individual not to save for their own retirement and companies to stop providing pensions. It’s time for an open and honest debate on the ethics of the welfare state, the benefits and real costs. Perhaps it’s time to close that particular social contract, pay out those that are currently in the system, and start privately owned accounts for the follow on generations. We could even sponsor catastrophic disability insurance and death benefit insurance to continue a self-financed safety net.
What is abundantly clear is that we cannot continue to do more of the same. That is failing in dramatic ways. Perhaps it is simplistic, but some of the best and most true answers in life are simple. We should return to doing things the way we did them when the system actually worked. This isn’t rocket science. We have gradually added more and more expenses into the system, more and more liabilities, until we cannot sustain them all anymore. Let us begin to remove the layers until the system works again.
David Brooks was good. Even more valuable was the businessweek article he linked at the bottom of his piece. That was great, and the following two paragraphs really captured my experience of hanging out on American blogs:
So much discussion of public policy on the web has all the hallmarks of #1: ideologically driven policies that flow more from a set of philosophical tenets than from a critical reflection upon reality: idealist in more its nineteenth century form.
I am beginning think America could do with some more rigorous and principled centrist suggestions – because that’s where articles like these seem to be coming from. Anything that manages to outrage both the left and the right simultaneously might be a good cadidate for fitting the bill laid out by Sick and Tired of Nuance:
It’s a new thought for me, stimulated by the article Dr Harmon linked the other day: [url=http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/91123d9c-d216-11de-a0f0-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1]Creating An Opportunity Society[/url] which also seemed like bucketloads of common sense from a firmly centrist position.