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Brighter
Days Still Ahead for the
United States
By Rich Tucker
7/1/2011
With
the country mired in debt ($14.3
trillion and counting), entitlement programs such as Medicare and
Social
Security running out of money and unemployment seemingly stuck above 9
percent,
some wonder if it’s twilight time for the United States.
“I
know why America is falling into a
cataclysm of debt and can’t get out,” wrote Henry Allen, a former
Pulitzer
Prize winner, in The Washington Post on June 17. He blames, “a squalor
of doom
and debt that prompts the best sort of people to spit sarcasms at each
other
during cocktail hour, to weep and rage the way Congress is doing as the
debt
limit looms on Aug. 2.”
He
writes that, for many families, their
best days seemed in the past. “We were not unusual -- in so many
families, the
money had been made, the money had been spent.” But this is
unnecessarily
fatalistic. Decline isn’t inevitable. In many ways, it’s a choice, one
made by
both individuals and governments.
For
example, Allen writes that his
ancestors “built railroads.” Sadly, people don’t build them anymore,
but
government policies have a lot to do with that.
If
you set out to build a railroad,
after all, you’d need to obtain lots of land, and that would require
any number
of environmental impact statements. Neighbors would use federal and
state
lawsuits to slow your progress, meaning you’d spend years tied up in
red tape
before you could lay any track. And besides, the federal government has
vowed
to build high-speed rail lines hither and yon. You can’t compete with
Uncle
Sam.
Still,
there are plenty of ways a
person can succeed. Instead of a railroad, why not start a trucking
company? Or
get some Segway scooters and begin giving tours of your historic
neighborhood?
American prosperity is restrained only by American ingenuity, and our
ingenuity
is virtually boundless.
Allen
imagines a very different
America, though. “The conversation usually goes this way: proposals for
impossible cuts in spending are met by equally impossible refusals to
make
them. Slash Medicare? Stop saving oppressed foreigners from tyranny?
Raise
taxes? The rock and the hard place. It’s a question of standards,” he
writes.
He
sees the country mired in ennui,
unable or unwilling to move forward. Instead of doing something, Allen
imagines
us wringing our hands as problems get worse. However, there are
proposals to
address our problems. Rep. Paul Ryan, for example, drafted a proposal
that aims
to fix Medicare -- not by slashing it, but by introducing consumer
choice for
those under the age of 55. This market-based approach would unlock the
power of
American creativity and could allow our system to deliver better
medical
services for less money. It’s certainly worth a try.
The
House of Representatives has
passed the Ryan plan, while the Senate voted it down. The proposal is
likely to
loom large in next year’s presidential election, and that’s probably
good. It
would give Americans a stark contrast upon which to vote. Allen
concludes that
our decline could mean shoddy treatment even for our nation’s fallen
heroes.
“Next thing, we’d be tossing the bodies of veterans into common graves,
though
this has already happened at Arlington National Cemetery.”
He’s
correct that the scandal at
Arlington is an embarrassment. But the problem isn’t that our
government ran
out of money to operate the cemetery. Instead, as the Post documented
in a
series of stories, the federal government poured millions into
upgrading a
computer system, yet the cemetery’s administrators used pencils and
note cards
to keep burial records. It’s a case of government waste, not government
wasting
away.
But
all is not lost.
“By
every benchmark, this present age
should be an American century, here and abroad,” writes Victor Davis
Hanson of
Stanford’s Hoover Institute. “New finds of coal, natural gas, oil, tar
sands,
and oil shale keep growing, not declining.”
And,
he adds, “In an increasingly
hungry world, American farmland is the most productive on the planet.
Our farmers
are surely the most gifted and innovative. The United States has
inherited a
vast, developed infrastructure; our duty is to improve and expand it,
not, as
our ancestors had to, start from scratch by building a Hoover Dam,
intercontinental railroad, or port facilities in Oakland.”
The
tools are there. We just need to
use them.
It
isn’t inevitable that the United
States must slide into decline. If it does, it will be because
Americans chose
to, not because we had to. Let’s make the right choice.
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it at Townhall
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