There’s something fundamentally boring and trivial about the hyperventilation over sequestration or taxation. Yes, I’m concerned about defense cuts — not because there isn’t room to cut, but because I have zero confidence that the bureaucratic process will yield the right result. I can easily imagine a process that leaves an intact military bureaucracy while gutting combat power. Yes, I’m also concerned about tax increases and wonder how it helps our country to take money out of my pocket and put it instead into programs that don’t actually work. But in both cases it’s like we’re arguing with the doctor over treating a runny nose when the patient is bleeding to death right before our eyes.
Paul Krugman’s latest proposed tax increase – a return to confiscatory tax rates so successful in maintaining our economic power that a triumphant Jimmy Carter coasted to a second term (What? That didn’t happen?) — would best case provide additional revenue in ten years that is still hundreds of billions of dollars less than our current single-year deficit. The sequestration defense cuts, allegedly so severe that Leon Panetta is threatening to resign, would have even less impact on the long-term deficit.
Saddest of all, Americans look at a crumbling political culture and blame . . . Washington. Yet are they not the people we elected? Heck, not even the Tea Party rank and file are eager to take on Medicare and Social Security. We can’t push the illegitimacy rate over 40 percent and believe that we’re creating a productive, self-sufficient culture. No politician made millions of Americans abort millions of children, nor did politicians make us embrace no-fault divorce in our own lives or rationalize divorce for our families, friends, and neighbors. It is not Washington that compels us to wallow in our own self-love and look everywhere else for solutions to problems we’ve helped create for ourselves with profligate personal spending and impulsive, self-indulgent lifestyles. When we embrace self-love to the point where many of our fellow citizens will kill their own children, we can’t hope that political reform will bring any real hope.
Yes, I participate in politics in the hope that the next election will make things better, not worse, but I’m under no illusions about the power of politics to transform. The fiscal mess is merely a monetary representation of the moral culture we’ve created, where we draw down on the cultural capital built through the blood, sweat, tears, and — yes — virtue of previous generations and instead bestow upon our children a counterfeit legacy of self-esteem over self-sacrifice, insufferable political correctness over humility, and abject dependence over generous self-reliance.
Arguments over marginal tax rates and slowed rates of inexorable spending growth do matter in the sense that their outcome can either hasten or delay a cultural collapse that appears increasingly likely. But let’s not take our eyes off the real prize — a culture in desperate need of moral and spiritual renewal.
Please keep saying this loudly, David. So true. Conservatives, and Christians in particular, have made politics a god. We keep wanting to elect the "right" politician to enact the "right" laws to make everything better. That's not the way it works. WE as individuals need to be better people.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWe treat symptoms. My day job deals with companies, not governments, but finance types want to tinker with accounting or financing when the bottom line is that none of that matters if you're not producing a product/service that customers value. A country with a 40% illegitimacy rate and large numbers of high school "graduates" who can't read, write or do arithmetic is not going to continue to have the leading economy no matter what laws and regulations DC creates.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseGreat insight into our decline and an expansion of Moynihan's "defining deviancy down".
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe spiral to the bottom has cultural and political roots.
Amen!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseKrugman's article is the usual garbage. He says that the super-rich made a trillion dollars last year, so hey, there's plenty of new money to take from them!
But he doesn't tell you:
-- How much of that money we are already taking
-- How much of that money we are not taking for a good reason, such as they gave it to charity, or it was interest on tax-free loans to governments, or it was from an investment we want to encourage, or any one of a million other reasons
His "argument" is just that rich people apparently have some amount of money, so why don't we just let Harry Reid take it and spend it on whatever he wants? Wouldn't that be a universal good?
I can't believe this guy has a job.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseKrugman said that the top 0.1 percent of taxpayers pulled in a combined adjusted gross income of over a trillion dollars in 2007. If you look at the tax charts, 2007 was the peak year for income across the board, and I doubt he picked that year at random. That number in 2009 had dropped to about $610 billion. I don't know what it is now.
Confiscating every dime of that income would pay for less than half the deficit for just 2011.
Krugman isn't firing on all cylinders anymore.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"Folks, you’re living in the past. Once upon a time America was a middle-class nation, in which the super-elite’s income was no big deal."
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYeah. Folks like J.P.Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller never existed and those efforts to breakup Standard Oil were meaningless and vindictive.
Nobody ever claimed that Morgan, Carnegie or Rockefeller never existed. The claim was that the fact that those people had a lot of money was never a big deal.
And yes, the break up of Standard oil was both unnecessary and vindicitive.
Standard Oil was never a monopoly. They created a better method to refine oil and used those efficiencies to capture a large share of the market.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMost of the competitors to Standard Oil did what people in a free market do, they engaged in R&D and as a result improved their own processes and started taking back market share from Standard Oil.
A few competitors went a different route. They bought a few congressmen and used Washington to do what could not, or would no do on their own.
There's a lot of truth here, but I think that policy can have a greater effect on culture than Mr. French's post suggests. Look at what the welfare state has done to the character of Europeans, and what the Great Society did to black American families. People will exhibit virtues in environments in which virtues are rewarded (or necessary for survival). Policy shapes the environment.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseUnfortunately it's easier for government to destroy virtue (your examples are good ones) than to build it. Charles Murray is particularly good on this subject.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseTrue enough, and I certainly wouldn't want the State to start imposing policies designed to make us virtuous. My point was that repealing detrimental policies could go a significant way toward restoring an environment in which the same pressures that tended to produce virtue in previous generations produce it again.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI would go further and state that it is impossible for the state to create virtue.
The best they can do is foster an environment in which individuals can develop virtue for themselves.
Such an environment is one in which individuals have to suffer through the consequences of their own bad decisions, and in which individuals are permitted to reap the rewards of their own good decisions.
Which unfortunately is the exact opposite of our current governing philosophy.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"No politician made millions of Americans abort millions of children, nor did politicians make us embrace no-fault divorce.... It is not Washington that compels us to wallow in our own self-love ... with profligate personal spending and impulsive, self-indulgent lifestyles. When we embrace self-love to the point where many of our fellow citizens will kill their own children, we can’t hope that political reform will bring any real hope."
I have no idea who David French is, but I will be following his writings from now on. He's spot on the money with this article.
Pace my favorite Mark Steyn, there is no way we will solve the financial crisis this election. None. It isn't just the politicians we have to change; it is the country.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseDon't forget that the previous generations who were so 'moral' that they call themselves the 'greatest' generation sat down in 1935 and 1965 and voted themselves a massive party at the expense of their own children and Grandchildren. Then after being told for a generation that their wealth and leisure was (non consensually) looted from their own flesh and blood, what have they done? Only voted in droves against anyone who would even marginally reduce the scale of the crime.
So if you spent your entire life being looted by mummy, daddy, gammie and gamps while they shouted to the heavens that you were the most important thing in their lives and they loved you so much, wouldn't YOU be a bit screwed up. Our debauched culture comes from our oh so progressive parents and grandparents.
They've raped us. And there's not a damned thing we can do about it.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhen it comes to your desire to engage cultural warfare, take it elsewhere.
People "kill their children" because they are self indulgent? Seriously? It couldn't POSSIBLY be because they don't happen to share your religious convictions concerning when life begins, could it?
What i see here is an unreasonable, mindless, self-righteous, judgmentalism.
And I am not against exercising judgment either. But I believe judgment must be exercised with prudence, a quality that you are clearly lacking.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbusePeople DO kill their unborn because they are self indulgent. What possible other reason could there be? They may not think it wrong or immoral, but it is certainly selfish.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseOkay, so illegitimacy and abortion are tied to national finances? Seriously?
If an abortionist adulterer ran for president with the real promise of balancing the budget and restoring respect for America as a superpower, I would vote for him. The moral problems and financial problems of America are separate - dependency is a bad thing, but you can't blame it for rampant sexual irresponsibility.
Also, politics are something we can take a role in fixing immediately, and I don't see any Great Awakenings ready to sweep in and save the day, so politics it must be.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"The moral problems and financial problems in America are separate?" Really? And you know this... how? Irresponsible, self-indulgent behavior is irresponsible, self-indulgent behavior, period. Morality isn't a concept that's confined to the bedroom. Is it really impossible for you to see a connection between a corrupt culture and a corrupt economic system? To me, the connection is obvious.
"Dependency is a bad thing... but you can't blame it for rampant sexual irresponsibility."Again, are you so sure? If I knew I would receive a check from the government every month for every child I had, mightn't I worry a bit less about bringing children into the world without fathers? Perhaps I'd even see it as a good idea. Of course, it may not always work that way. But it DEFINITELY works the other way around. Sexual irresponsibility – i.e. having children out of wedlock – DEFINITELY breeds dependency.
David French is absolutely right. Short of a "Great Awakening," any dream of a smaller government and a responsible, independent citizenry is just that: a dream.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThis is spot on.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse