Back to Work - Bill Clinton [7]
Americans have always had heated debates about what government should and shouldn’t do. Because we were founded in reaction to the unaccountable and overreaching power of British colonialism, we’ve often been of two minds: we don’t want too much government, but we want enough. How much is enough but not too much is the traditional dividing line between liberals and conservatives. The debate changed in 1980. As President Reagan declared in his first inaugural address, “Government is the problem.” If government is the problem, the question is always, “How can we get less of it?” If you ask the right questions, you may not always get the right answers. But if you ask the wrong questions, you can’t get the right answers.
I believe the only way we can keep the American Dream alive for all Americans and continue to be the world’s leading force for freedom and prosperity, peace and security, is to have both a strong, effective private sector and a strong, effective government that work together to promote an economy of good jobs, rising incomes, increasing exports, and greater energy independence. All over the world, the most successful nations, including many with lower unemployment rates, less inequality, and, in this decade, even higher college graduation rates than the United States, have both. And they work together, not always agreeing, but moving toward common goals. In other countries, conservatives and liberals also have arguments about taxes, energy policy, bank regulations, and how much government is healthy and affordable, but they tend to be less ideological and more rooted in evidence and experience. They focus more on what works.
That’s the focus America needs. It’s the only way to get back into the future business. In the modern world, when too few citizens have the time or opportunity to analyze the larger forces shaping our lives, and the lines between news, advocacy, and entertainment are increasingly blurred, ideological conflicts effectively waged may be good politics, and provide fodder for the nightly news, talk shows, and columnists, but they won’t get us to a better future.
Our long antigovernment obsession has proved to be remarkably successful politics, but its policy failures have given us an anemic, increasingly unequal economy, with too few jobs and stagnant incomes; put us at a competitive disadvantage compared with other nations, especially in manufacturing and clean energy; and left us a potentially crippling debt burden just as the baby boomers begin to retire.
By contrast, other nations, as well as states and cities within the United States, with a commitment to building networks of cooperation involving the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, are creating economic opportunity and charging into the future with confidence.
My argument here isn’t that Democrats are always right and Republicans always wrong. It’s that by jamming all issues into the antigovernment, antitax, antiregulation straitjacket, we hog-tie ourselves and keep ourselves from making necessary changes no matter how much evidence exists to support them. The antigovernment paradigm blinds us to possibilities that lie outside its ideological litmus tests and prevents us from creating new networks of cooperation that can restore economic growth, bring economic opportunity to more people and places, and increase our ability to lead the world to a better future.
To develop an effective strategy to get the jobs engine going again and deal with our long-term debt problem, we have to take off the blinders of antigovernment ideology and focus on what role government must play in America’s renewal.
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1 Unlike student loans, Pell