How to Trim REAL Fat from the Budget
(Prepared for a Northeast Public Radio Commentary)
Americans are polarized over the measures being taken to address the current financial meltdown, but scratching each other’s eyes out over ideological differences only blinds us to the broader historical trends at work. This country has been on a steady and predictable decline since the 1960s.
In 1947, the United States accounted for one-third of the world’s exports, and throughout the 1950s and early ‘60s, the United States ranked first in the production of oil, steel, automobiles, airplanes, and electronics. We determined the price of oil. We were not only a creditor nation, we were the leading creditor nation. By yesterday’s standards we are, today, unrecognizable. We are now lagging in all industrial sectors, imports far outstrip exports, and we have become a debtor nation, with a current federal debt of $11 Trillion, much of it borrowed from China. As a result, we are even losing our ability to leverage democratic principles abroad. One need only witness China’s growing human rights abuses and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent comment that talk of human rights has no place at the table during these troubling economic times. Translation: We are beholden to China.
What happened? We became victims of our own success, and greed. The United States grew at a healthy clip for generations, expanding from one coast to the other, economic prosperity fueled by the abundance of our country’s natural resources. We emerged from the ashes of the Second World War as the world’s leading industrial, military, economic and political power, and quickly expanded outward. We also began to export unregulated capitalism, under the cloak of democracy, to exploit foreign resources to feed our growing appetites. By the 1960s, the boundaries of the United States could be measured in global proportions.
The mid-to-late ‘60s witnessed the beginning of the downward trajectory: Vietnam, declining productivity, increasing dependence on imported goods, oil shortages, and increasing competition: first against the rebuilt and modernized economies of Germany and Japan and, most recently, against the new-found wealth and productivity in the Middle East, India, Russia and China.
That same 40-year period saw a steady deregulation of the markets, notably the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act during the Clinton Administration. That Act had been passed by Congress during the Depression to prohibit commercial banks (and protect its depositors) from participating in speculative investments. The trend accelerated these past eight years with continuing deregulation coupled with an almost complete lack of regulatory oversight. In 2001, planes brought down not only the World Trade Towers but, eventually, the U.S. economy through two wars in the Middle East we still haven’t finished and haven’t yet paid for (we are indebted to China in this regard).
Over the years, banks have made it seductively easy to qualify for credit, and many Americans purchased houses they could not afford or signed off on mortgages they did not fully understand, while lenders looked the other way. For decades, the captains of industry have prevented the modernization of our energy infrastructure, and American automakers refused to respond to the growing trend for cleaner, fuel-efficient cars, losing market share each passing year. Short-term profits and personal gain trumped long-term health and stability.
A telling parallel over the same 40-year period is the rising rate of obesity, from 12% of Americans in 1966 to 32% today. If present trends continue, 90% of men and 70% of women will be overweight in 11 years’ time, 40% of us obese. And all of the bickering over the size of the current $750 Billion stimulus package? According to a team of epidemiologists from Johns Hopkins and the Pennsylvania University School of Medicine, health-care costs attributable to weight problems alone are on track to exceed $900 Billion by 2030. Let’s have a REAL conversation about trimming fat from the budget. For the first time in America’s history, average life span is declining, health care costs have spiked and individuals and businesses can no longer shoulders that health care burden.
We are eating other people’s food, and we have lived off the fruits of other people’s labor. In short, our excesses have caught up with us, and we are feeling the sting of consequence, as others have all along. The silver lining in this country’s economic disintegration is that it presents to us the possibility of re-integrating in entirely new ways. I hope that, in the process, we shed the old economic model based upon scarcity and replace it with a model that integrates us globally; a theology of economics, if you will, that raises standards of living, globally, from the bottom up. £
Americans are polarized over the measures being taken to address the current financial meltdown, but scratching each other’s eyes out over ideological differences only blinds us to the broader historical trends at work. This country has been on a steady and predictable decline since the 1960s.
In 1947, the United States accounted for one-third of the world’s exports, and throughout the 1950s and early ‘60s, the United States ranked first in the production of oil, steel, automobiles, airplanes, and electronics. We determined the price of oil. We were not only a creditor nation, we were the leading creditor nation. By yesterday’s standards we are, today, unrecognizable. We are now lagging in all industrial sectors, imports far outstrip exports, and we have become a debtor nation, with a current federal debt of $11 Trillion, much of it borrowed from China. As a result, we are even losing our ability to leverage democratic principles abroad. One need only witness China’s growing human rights abuses and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent comment that talk of human rights has no place at the table during these troubling economic times. Translation: We are beholden to China.
What happened? We became victims of our own success, and greed. The United States grew at a healthy clip for generations, expanding from one coast to the other, economic prosperity fueled by the abundance of our country’s natural resources. We emerged from the ashes of the Second World War as the world’s leading industrial, military, economic and political power, and quickly expanded outward. We also began to export unregulated capitalism, under the cloak of democracy, to exploit foreign resources to feed our growing appetites. By the 1960s, the boundaries of the United States could be measured in global proportions.
The mid-to-late ‘60s witnessed the beginning of the downward trajectory: Vietnam, declining productivity, increasing dependence on imported goods, oil shortages, and increasing competition: first against the rebuilt and modernized economies of Germany and Japan and, most recently, against the new-found wealth and productivity in the Middle East, India, Russia and China.
That same 40-year period saw a steady deregulation of the markets, notably the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act during the Clinton Administration. That Act had been passed by Congress during the Depression to prohibit commercial banks (and protect its depositors) from participating in speculative investments. The trend accelerated these past eight years with continuing deregulation coupled with an almost complete lack of regulatory oversight. In 2001, planes brought down not only the World Trade Towers but, eventually, the U.S. economy through two wars in the Middle East we still haven’t finished and haven’t yet paid for (we are indebted to China in this regard).
Over the years, banks have made it seductively easy to qualify for credit, and many Americans purchased houses they could not afford or signed off on mortgages they did not fully understand, while lenders looked the other way. For decades, the captains of industry have prevented the modernization of our energy infrastructure, and American automakers refused to respond to the growing trend for cleaner, fuel-efficient cars, losing market share each passing year. Short-term profits and personal gain trumped long-term health and stability.
A telling parallel over the same 40-year period is the rising rate of obesity, from 12% of Americans in 1966 to 32% today. If present trends continue, 90% of men and 70% of women will be overweight in 11 years’ time, 40% of us obese. And all of the bickering over the size of the current $750 Billion stimulus package? According to a team of epidemiologists from Johns Hopkins and the Pennsylvania University School of Medicine, health-care costs attributable to weight problems alone are on track to exceed $900 Billion by 2030. Let’s have a REAL conversation about trimming fat from the budget. For the first time in America’s history, average life span is declining, health care costs have spiked and individuals and businesses can no longer shoulders that health care burden.
We are eating other people’s food, and we have lived off the fruits of other people’s labor. In short, our excesses have caught up with us, and we are feeling the sting of consequence, as others have all along. The silver lining in this country’s economic disintegration is that it presents to us the possibility of re-integrating in entirely new ways. I hope that, in the process, we shed the old economic model based upon scarcity and replace it with a model that integrates us globally; a theology of economics, if you will, that raises standards of living, globally, from the bottom up. £
posted by Jeffrey Reel at
5:19 PM
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