That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [151]
At the same time, though, politics in California, like national politics, operates under the sway of powerful special interests, whose donations to candidates for public office and lobbying of public officials tend to aggravate rather than resolve the state’s problems. California’s public employees’ unions, for example, are particularly adept at winning benefits for their members: a Sacramento fire-truck driver earns a salary of $144,000 per year in a county where the average annual wage is about $52,000. Firefighters should be well paid, but there have to be some limits. When you combine powerful public employee unions with powerful anti-tax activists and little willingness to compromise in one state, it spells “bankruptcy.”
There’s an old Navajo saying that if we don’t turn around now, we just might get where we’re going. If we as a country don’t find a way to overcome hyper-partisanship and super-empowered special interests, we too may get where we’re going—to the place at which California has already arrived. That will be us.
THIRTEEN
Devaluation
As we peer into society’s future, we—you and I, and our government—must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage.
—President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address,
January 19, 1961
On November 26, 2010, The New York Times ran an unusual article—the advice of a dying man. It was the life story of Gordon Murray, a former bond salesman for Goldman Sachs who became a managing director at both Lehman Brothers and Credit Suisse First Boston. He had recently decided to cease all treatment for his glioblastoma, a type of brain cancer, but rather than live out his days going through his bucket list, the story noted, “he hunkered down in his tiny home office here and channeled whatever remaining energy he could muster into a slim paperback. It’s called The Investment Answer, and he wrote it with his friend and financial adviser Daniel Goldie to explain investing in a handful of simple steps.” What struck us was the line—a red line, really—that Murray drew between the old Wall Street where he began his career back in the 1970s and the Wall Street that eventually blew up in 2008. The story noted that Murray “got a lot of second chances thanks to an affluent background and basketball prowess. He eventually landed at Goldman Sachs, long before many people looked askance at anyone who worked there. ‘Our word was our bond, and good ethics was good business,’ he said of his Wall Street career. ‘That got replaced by liar loans and ‘I hope I’m gone by the time this thing blows up.’”
It is hard to find a more concise and accurate description of something else that happened with the end of the Cold War and the passing of the baton from the Greatest Generation to the baby boom generation: an erosion of important, traditional American values that long underpinned our public and commercial life.
This decline in values has done as much as political hyper-partisanship to undermine our ability to address our great challenges and revive our formula for prosperity. This decline did not happen overnight. It occurred gradually, little by little, almost imperceptibly beneath the surface of daily events, like the geological process known as continental drift that, over millions of years, divided the Earth’s surface into its separate landmasses. Because it happened in an incremental way, we didn’t notice it—until the subprime crisis in 2008 showed just how far we had drifted from some of the bedrock values that used to be us.
Here again, the passage from one generation to another has made a large and, from the point of view of the country’s future, unfortunate difference.