The last few weeks, I’ve been wrestling with the peculiar disconnect in the Great American Dialogue about what we do next as a society.<\/p>\n
Like so many modern, post-industrial democracies, we’ve discovered that we have been enjoying the benefits of a lot more government than we’re actually paying for.<\/p>\n
Millions of seniors, to cite one example, will receive far more in Social Security payments — along with other government aid for prescription drugs and other services — than they paid for with their taxes.<\/p>\n
We know this is unsustainable because currently roughly a third of Federal spending is “paid for” through borrowing.<\/p>\n
The problem, though, is that the debate over what to do about this mess has gotten tangled up in an ideology that a lot of people espouse, but very few people actually embrace.<\/p>\n
Put simply, we live in a Big Government world.<\/p>\n
Compared with the 1930s — before Franklin Roosevelt launched the New Deal — our lives are touched (and yes, improved) at almost every juncture by government.<\/p>\n
Government educates our children.\u00a0 It cares for our elderly.\u00a0 It builds the roads we drive on.\u00a0 It monitors the food we eat and the drugs we take.<\/p>\n
We expect government to fix the economy.\u00a0 We expect it to adjudicate our disputes.\u00a0 We want it to defend us and we want it to protect the supply of commodities (such as oil) that we rely upon.<\/p>\n
I am writing this blog post using a government invention (the internet) on a computer powered by a government regulated utility.<\/p>\n
And the simple truth is that most Americans take all this for granted.\u00a0 We want and expect that all these things will get done.<\/p>\n
But we also want the luxury of pretending that we’re still a frontier society.\u00a0 We like to think that we’re independent of the herd, lifted not by the takes-a-village-ethos of our Federal government, but by our own bootstraps.<\/p>\n
It’s a myth, I’m sorry to say.\u00a0 There are very few Americans alive who have any memory of what that nation looks like.<\/p>\n
Our debates are further bamboozled because our mental portraits of that Lost America are usually nonsense, whether they are concocted by the left (who fantasize about a pre-industrial, less money-grubbing, more organic society) or the right (who croon for a more moral, more self-reliant, more free era).<\/p>\n
The reality,of course, is more harsh.<\/p>\n
The reality is that things are a lot better now in America than they used to be.\u00a0 The vast majority of government does really good things for us.<\/p>\n
Most of the “entitlements” and “mandates” that people grumble about have helped to lift people out of poverty or ended their isolation or made their lives a little more fair — even, in many cases, a lot more free.<\/p>\n
Those seniors that I mentioned at the beginning of this post?\u00a0 A huge portion of them used to live in truly sickening poverty, a moral and economic crisis that big government programs largely solved.<\/p>\n
So the problem at the end of the day isn’t that Big Government is bad.\u00a0 (Again, even many people who claim to believe that are usually relying on government for a big chunk of their quality of life.)<\/p>\n
The problem is that we can no longer afford it.\u00a0 Or quite so much of it.\u00a0 Even after we boost taxes (and we will), deep cuts will have to be made in programs and services.<\/p>\n
I suspect there will be real pain.\u00a0 There will be times when we will call government agencies, expecting them to help us as they have in the past, and we will be turned away.<\/p>\n
But if we begin to talk more honestly about government, about what it does in our lives, we can also begin to make smarter, more efficient, and less ideological decisions.<\/p>\n
As always, your comments welcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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