It's Time for American's to Act Like Adults

Why is it that so many Baltimore Sun readers refuse to acknowledge our dire financial straights? How much worse does it have to get before people cease protecting their pet programs from spending cuts, or their enormous wealth from tax increases?

The fact is, we will have to increase some taxes and make drastic cuts in spending if we are to survive as a nation. And frankly, doing the right thing is not nearly as complicated as some folks make it out to be.

Sun writer Lawrence B. Coshnear makes a compelling case for raising taxes on millionaires. This is a no-brainer to me. But Mr. Coshnear oversimplifies when he suggests that taxes as a % of GDP would be a good benchmark for our standing in the world. It wouldn’t. GDP’s vary by nation, and there is no reason to believe that nations with high output would necessarily require more taxes or spending than poorer nations. In fact, it would stand to reason that the opposite is true. Just as a rich family requires less spending as a % of income, so does a rich nation require less spending as a % of GDP.

Sun writer F. Mark Walters believes we should stop bailouts for large corporations and start making cuts in defense spending. We agree. But the suggestion that by cutting taxes and reducing spending the GOP is “throwing people out of work in a time of high unemployment” is ridiculous. Long term, raising taxes and increased government spending is a recipe for high future unemployment, not low future unemployment. We can't forget that. And R&D spending is great, but not when you’re 14 trillion dollars in debt. For now, R&D spending should remain driven by the private sector, because federal spending must be limited to the bare necessities until out debt is paid off.

Writer Jack Kinstlinger makes little sense when he attempts to laud Obama’s budget. First, the claim that Obama’s budget will “reduce the nation's deficit by a projected $1.1 trillion over 10 years” is misleading. Even if you believe that number, which is predicated on very rosy fiscal forecasting, Obama’s budget will add an unconceivable $7 trillion in new debt over that same decade. Make no mistake, Obama is on track to add more money to our national debt than all previous presidents combined. Erskine Bowles, Democratic co-chair of Obama’s debt commission, is quoted as saying that the budget Obama just proposed is "nowhere near where they will have to go to resolve our fiscal nightmare." Strong words from one of the few fiscally reasonable Democrats remaining on the national scene. The proposed budget is anti-child and does nothing to reign in our long-term fiscal problems.

Mr. Kinstlinger goes on to write that as a world power we “cannot accept a third world infrastructure and poorly educated children. Witness the massive investments in China and India, two burgeoning economies and future competitors”. What Mr. Kinstlinger fails to acknowledge or perhaps doesn’t know is that both India and China spend just a fraction of what we spend on education. Far less than 50%. In order to take our investment in children to where India and China are, we would have to slash our education spending dramatically. In fact, Mr. Kinstlinger could have used no better example to refute his argument than India and China. The success of these two nations makes it clear that the answer to our education crisis is not in more spending. We need an overhaul of the entire system. And while we agree that we don’t want to “gut” programs that assist the poor, elderly and sick, we do have to revisit how these programs are structured.

Robert Rector and Kirk Johnson detail in the 2007 report “How Poor Are America's Poor? Examining the "Plague" of Poverty in America” just how generous we are as a nation. According to census numbers, forty-three percent of all poor households actually own their own homes, eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning and the average poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.) Nearly three-quarters of poor households own a car; 31 percent own two or more cars. Ninety-seven percent of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions. Seventy-eight percent have a VCR or DVD player; 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception. Eighty-nine percent own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and more than a third have an automatic dishwasher.

In addition, Rector and Johnson report that there is little or no evidence of poverty-induced malnutrition in the United States. It is often believed that a lack of financial resources forces poor people to eat low-quality diets that are deficient in nutriments and high in fat. However, survey data show that nutriment density does not vary by income class. (C. T. Windham et al., "Nutrient Density of Diets in the USDA Nationwide Food Consumption Survey, 1977-1978: Impact of Socioeconomic Status on Dietary Density," Journal of the American Dietetic Association, January 1983.) Over-consumption of calories in general, however, is a major problem among the poor, as it is within the general U.S. population.

We are not mean to our poor, and we can not allow misleading statements to the contrary to be used as an excuse to keep us from doing what must be done to get our financial house in order. Even after cuts are made, America’s poor citizens will remain much better off than most of the world. And there is nothing worse we can do for the poor than to push the debt down the road a decade or two, at which point in time our nation will have no option except to completely eliminate all social services.

George S. Wills, chairman of the board of the Maryland Public Television Foundation, writes to the Sun that we are in real jeopardy of losing our funding for public television. Now there’s an idea that’s about thirty years overdue. Forget for a moment the political mess associated with the recent NPR Juan Williams firing scandal. The fact is that Discovery Channel, History Channel and many other channels are widely available and have programming that’s light years ahead of MPT. These channels are more informational, have better graphics and programming, and much of it can be absorbed and enjoyed by young children. MPT is an expenditure of taxpayer money at a time when all of our money is being borrowed from the Chinese to be paid back by our children. MPT shouldn’t receive another dime of taxpayer money.

The fact is, we spend too much on defense. In contrast to what some folks would have us believe, American’s, GOP included, are extremely generous to our poor. We don’t tax our millionaires enough. We don’t pay our lowest paid employees enough, particularly home health care workers, food service workers, and others in the service industry. There is not enough of a distinction between the working poor and the dependent poor. We have horrible policies in place, essentially paying girls to have babies, relegating both mother and child to a lifetime of poverty that taxpayers foot the bill for. We spend far more on public education and get far less for our money than any nation on the planet. Almost all developed nations have a more effective public education system in place, and many American private schools educate far better for a fraction of the cost. We need to find out why.

We are unrealistic when it comes to entitlement spending, something that must be addressed but that Obama failed to address in his budget. We can’t expect to live to be 90 years old and retire at 62 with full Social Security benefits. We can’t continue to pass our debt along to our children and grandchildren. It’s unconscionable, unfair, and our parents didn’t do it to us.

The only way to avoid the inevitable political shenanigans that are sure to take place as we attempt to rectify this mess is to implement both spending cuts and tax increases on the wealthy. Spending cuts must be across the board, including defense, social services and entitlements. We need to simplify our tax code, so that people like admitted tax cheats Timothy Geithner and Democrat Congressman Charlie Rangel have less influence on the process going forward. People who cheat on their taxes should lose their right to formulate tax policy.

Lastly, we must remember that what made us great is putting a system in place that invited innovation and risk. To that end, holding up other nations as the benchmark for how we conduct ourselves is ill-advised. We need to reign in entitlements, lose unrealistic expectations of the government, quit asking for handouts and to start acting like adults.



Editor - bethesite.com