That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [144]
Persuading seniors to do so will be hard; not all of them are well-to-do “greedy geezers.” The baby boom generation as a whole has a dismally low savings rate, which means that its members are counting on Social Security payments as a much-needed source of income for their retirement years. Serious cuts to Medicare spending would likely affect the quality of care, probably shortening the lives of some of the older Americans who will depend on it. Yet some restraints on the otherwise soaring costs of these two programs are necessary, as the AARP itself has recognized in the case of Social Security, if America is to renew its formula for greatness and tackle its major challenges.
While reducing Social Security and Medicare may be unfair to older Americans, under-investing in education is harmful to everyone. In this sense, entitlements serve a special interest, while education serves the national interest. Virtually all studies of the subject show that the earlier in an individual’s life an investment in his or her education is made, the greater will be the payoff in productivity and income earned in the course of that person’s life. A dollar wisely invested in early education can do far more to meet the challenges of the world we are living in than a dollar spent on a senior citizen, no matter how deserving he or she may be.
Show Me the Money
The novelist William Faulkner, the recipient of the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, once said that “to live anywhere in the world of AD 1955 and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.” So is being against money in politics. Money has always been a part of politics—at least of democratic politics—and always will be. Like partisanship and special interests, however, money has taken on a markedly more pronounced political role in recent years, to the detriment of the policies America desperately needs to enact.
Much of the money goes to pay for the ever more elaborate technology of contemporary political campaigns: polling, direct-mail solicitation, robo-calling, and television advertising. In 1974, the money spent on the congressional election—the combined spending by all the candidates for the House of Representatives and the Senate—was $75 million. During the next several election cycles this sum escalated sharply, reaching $343 million in 1982. The amount of money spent on campaigns has continued to climb upward ever since. Altogether, the candidates for the 2010 congressional election spent $879 million.
Where do candidates get all that money? Some of it comes from organizations dedicated to promoting particular causes or issues that tend to fall at either end of the ideological spectrum: gay rights and the environment for Democrats, abortion and gun rights for conservatives. Committed partisans give more money than people in the middle, which aggravates the polarization of American politics.
But candidates’ money also comes in large quantities from special interests. Politicians spend an enormous amount of time raising the money they get and spend. The constant need to raise money not only empowers the special interests, which have the money to give; it also disempowers the politicians, by forcing them to spend almost as much time raising money as they do governing. The politicians we spoke to estimated that it routinely takes up a quarter of their working days, and sometimes more. Senator Evan Bayh, the Indiana Democrat who retired in 2011 after two terms, told us that when his father served in the Senate, from 1963 to 1981, “the saying was that you legislate for four years and campaign for two.” Now, by contrast, campaigning—especially in the form of fund-raising—goes on all the time. “There are people,” Bayh said, referring to his Senate colleagues, “who go from their swearing-in to a fund-raiser that night for their reelection that’s six years away. That has happened and is happening! So it never stops.
“If fund-raising and all things political are constantly in the forefront of