In the waning weeks of his doomed
Presidential campaign, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney decided that
he needed to appeal to undecided young female voters. His hard-right
rhetoric in the Republican primaries seemed to have painted him into a corner,
as he had taken extreme positions on abortion, access to contraception, and
related matters. With the election slipping away, he began to try to appeal
to the voters who had been turned off by his earlier, emphatic statements that
had aligned him with the cultural conservatives at the core of his party.
The advertisement that the Romney/Ryan
campaign produced in that effort was, in some respects, unremarkable. The
candidate tried to moderate his position, suggesting that he had never really
been the extremist on reproductive issues that he had seemed to be. The
advertisement tried to accomplish this transition by showing an attractive (but
not too attractive), earnest young actress portraying a
middle-class mother of young children. She informed listeners that
Romney’s views on various issues of interest to women had been exaggerated or
fabricated, and she declared herself to be satisfied that he was not the
extremist whom his opponents were depicting him to be.
The record is clear that Romney really
had, in fact, taken extreme positions in the past with respect to issues that
many women care about. Thus, this advertisement represented (at best) yet
another change in Romney’s positions. Again, however, the advertisement,
up to that point, was unremarkable. It employed standard political spin,
emotional appeals, and more contortions from the Etch-a-Sketch candidate.
What made the advertisement remarkable, however, was the logical move that the
actress then made.
What worried her as a woman, she said,
was not whether Governor Romney would protect her rights in the reproductive
arena. No, she was worried as a mother about her children’s future, living in a
world with ever-growing federal debt. She was most worried that President
Obama was impoverishing their future by spending too much money.
As cynical as the Romney campaign was
from beginning to end, this attempt to redirect women from worrying about “women’s
issues” to worrying about “mothers’ issues” was notable. It started with
a completely false defense of Romney’s views on reproductive rights, and then
changed the subject to federal debt. A viewer could have been forgiven
for asking, “Wait, what were we talking about, again?”
Even so, the latter half of that
advertisement embodied a consistent theme of the Romney/Ryan campaign, which is
that there is something deeply immoral about “saddling our children and
grandchildren with debt.” This theme, of course, was hardly new when the
Republicans seized upon it after President Obama won the 2008 election.
The notion that deficit spending by governments harms future generations has
been a constant attack on “big government” for decades. This notion has
been used by politicians and pundits to suggest that anything a government does
is wasteful and harms those who will inherit the country from us.
This notion is simply incorrect, and
it always has been. In fact, the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Sandy
has exposed precisely what is at stake when we talk about building a prosperous
world for current and future generations. The government is not only
capable of making the future more prosperous, but it has a moral obligation do
so.
The Continuing Attempt by
Anti-Government Ideologues to Pretend that There is No Difference Between
Investing and Consuming
As I discussed as recently as two
months ago, in a Verdict column exploring
the Romney/Ryan proposals to reduce benefits to seniors in the name of reducing
taxes on younger people, the attempt to invoke the interests of children and
grandchildren is a favorite tactic of anti-government politicians and
pundits. The simplistic idea is based on little more than Shakespeare’s
famous line: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” How could any
responsible adult overspend today, Romney asked, knowing that today’s innocent
children will someday foot the bill?
In “The Simpsons,” a minor character
has one simple catch-phrase: “What about the children? Won’t someone think
of the children?!” In real life, the Republicans prominently featured
the “national debt clock” during their August convention, hoping to drive home
the idea that at least they were finally thinking about the
children. Would we continue to leave our children with the bill for our
profligacy? Not on their watch, they assured us (even though, of course,
they had increased debt massively under the Reagan and both Bush
Administrations).
But why is the Shakespearean dictum so
wrong? Certainly, I would not be happy if my parents had borrowed money,
spent it, and left me with the bill (plus interest). Or would I? If
my parents had borrowed the money to pay for my college education, and then
expected me to pay down the debt, I would not only have considered that to be a
completely reasonable expectation on their part, but I would have thanked them
for it.
The problem, as has been pointed out
over and over again, is that anti-government ideologues assert without proof
that all government spending is either wasted or consumed by the current
generation. The fact, however, is that much government spending is, by
its very nature, designed to benefit both current and future generations.
It is investment, not consumption, and it therefore benefits the people who
will live in the future. Put another way, it benefits our children.
It is thus reasonable to finance such
spending by borrowing, because it allows us to spread the costs of such
spending among all of the people (current and future) who will enjoy the
benefits of such spending.
Making the Notion of “Infrastructure”
Salient: What Governments Do to Make Modern Living Possible
When I have tried to explain the
concept of government investment in the past, I have often focused on
education, as I did in a Verdict column earlier
this year. Because education is directly provided to the next generation,
it is intuitively obvious that its benefits are felt by the children who would
otherwise grow up not being able to read, write, or function in society.
However, the benefits of an educated
population are enjoyed even by those who do not rear children, because we are
able to enter retirement, safe in the knowledge that the next generation is
there to produce the goods and services that we will need as we enter our final
stages of life.
Beyond the benefit of creating an
educated populace, another fundamental argument for government involvement in
the economy is the familiar need to spend to create the infrastructure that a
modern capitalist economy requires to allow it to thrive. Going at least
as far back as Adam Smith, we have known that governments are uniquely
positioned to make the long-term investments in roads, dams, ports, railroads,
and so on that we need, but that no private entity would ever find sufficiently
profitable.
Even so, making that argument in the
abstract is often a challenge. Once, I was giving a speech in which I
pointed out that highways are “productive.” My audience looked
puzzled. Roads do not produce goods or services, so how could they be
called productive? I then asked them to imagine what would happen to the
local and national economies if every road on which they drove suddenly was
reduced by one lane in each direction. By imagining that disastrous
scenario, the audience instantly understood the essence of infrastructure
spending. Because it is so fundamental, however, our infrastructure is
all too easy to take for granted.
Hurricane Sandy and the Case for
Modern Government: President Obama, Governor Christie, and Others Show Why
Infrastructure and Good Governance Matters
Asking people to use their
imaginations is often helpful, but at times, sufficiently extreme reality can
truly make people understand what is at stake. We saw during Hurricane
Sandy last week the importance of having the physical infrastructure in place
to make modern living possible (and how miserable life can be when people
suddenly lose access to that infrastructure). That is why responsible
politicians are now thinking seriously about whether to build floodgates to
protect New York City, as well as investing in other infrastructure
improvements to allow us to continue to thrive, in a climate that will surely
produce an increasingly severe series of storms over the next few decades.
The relative difference between the
devastation from Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, however, is also in part built
on the idea that the federal government is the only sensible entity that can
prepare for future emergencies, and that can step in when disaster
strikes. It is not just the physical items like roads, bridges, sewage
systems, and the like that we need. It is also the human organizations
that must be in place to allow us to respond to extreme situations.
The myopia of Governor Romney’s
attacks earlier this year on spending for federal disaster preparedness were
thus exposed by Sandy’s wrath, making him look foolish for suggesting that
individual states or private corporations could have responded effectively to
last week’s destruction. We saw that a rejuvenated Federal Emergency
Management Agency (as well as other federal agencies, coordinating with state
and local responders) was truly necessary, and that—because of a commitment by
the Obama Administration to make FEMA an effective agency once again—it was up
to the job.
What made people admire the response
of New Jersey’s Republican Governor Chris Christie, after all, was that he saw
clearly that this was not a moment for anti-government demagoguery. The
Obama-led response to Hurricane Sandy had made it impossible to pretend any
longer that “the federal government can never do anything right.”
The Responsible Approach to
Inter-Generational Obligations: Stop Cutting Government for the Sake of Cutting
Spending
Some anti-government pundits have long
insisted on putting scare-quotes around the word “investment” when it is
applied to government spending, mocking the very idea that a government can do
anything right. The only responsible form of investment, they have loudly
proclaimed, is effected by “job creators,” the private businesses that are
supposedly being hampered by the oppressive hand of government.
As we now see all too clearly, the
efforts to cut federal spending have not only been cruel in the immediate
sense—cutting off poor people from assistance to heat their homes in winter,
for example, or reducing the already-minimal health care that they receive—but
they have also harmed the interests of future generations.
Disaster-relief funds had been reduced by Republican-led efforts to require
“fiscal prudence” by the federal government—only to have us all learn that it
is entirely imprudent to pretend that we do not need to invest in protecting
ourselves and the world that our children will inherit.
Last Tuesday, as I watched the
television coverage of the immediate impact of Hurricane Sandy, I realized that
we were witnessing a perfect example of what one generation truly owes to the
next. I have been writing on these subjects for many years, and the point
was now being made all too clearly by the realities of the storm.
Much to my delight and amazement, my
thoughts were almost immediately given voice by an elected politician on the
very television program that I was watching. Inan interview,
Connecticut’s Democratic Governor Dannel Malloy said: “We need to rebuild our
infrastructure, we need to harden our infrastructure, we need to protect that
infrastructure, and we need to do that not for ourselves, but for coming
generations.” He added that our ability to do so would determine “whether
our children and grandchildren are going to be able to compete with the rest of
the world.”
Mr. Malloy thus captured the essence
of what is at stake in our ongoing debate over the role of government in
society. The argument from the anti-government forces—as exemplified in
that political advertisement from the Romney/Ryan campaign that I described at
the beginning of this column—has always been that government steals from the
future. The reality has always been the opposite: Without an active
government, run by people who understand what government must do, the future
would be grim indeed.
President Obama’s victory in this
week’s elections, therefore, represents an opportunity for him and for Congress
finally to enact policies that will promote the real interests of current and
future generations. We must insist that the president take that
opportunity, to allow us to do our best to provide a bright future for our
children and grandchildren.
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