That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [88]
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the attacks on New York and Washington of September 11, Islamic terrorism, Osama bin Laden, Afghanistan, Iraq, and homeland security preoccupied Americans. We believe, however, that if we don’t change course, twenty-five years from now the war we undertook with al-Qaeda won’t seem nearly as important as the wars we waged against physics and math. We will be paying for these two wars far longer. And that’s the optimistic scenario.
If we don’t shrink the deficit to a more manageable size while investing in our traditional formula for success, and if we don’t address our long-term clean-energy needs while mitigating climate change, we will effectively be outsourcing America’s fate to the two most merciless, unemotional, and unrelenting forces on the planet: the market and Mother Nature. These two will determine, each in its own time and its own way, when its limits have been breached, when the laws of nature and of economics will kick in, when the music will stop, and when the adjustment to our lifestyle—which will be nasty, brutish, and long—will start.
The next two chapters explain how we got to this point.
NINE
The War on Math (and the Future)
Arithmetic is not an opinion.
—Italian proverb
In the winter of 2011 The New Yorker ran a cartoon showing an elderly man meeting with his banker. The caption underneath had the man saying, “I want to take out one of those mortgages on my grandchildren’s future.”
That little cartoon summed up not only how we have behaved in the past but how much damage we can still do to our future if we don’t change course and bring our national debt, entitlements, and annual deficits under control—in an intelligent way. Given all of our excessive spending since the end of the Cold War, a certain amount of intergenerational conflict over who pays what is now impossible to avoid, as the cartoon suggested. What remains to be determined is whether it is a battle or a full-fledged civil war—the old against the young. The battle lines have already been drawn: Medicare versus Pell Grants for college tuition, nursing homes versus community colleges, the last year of grandma’s life in the hospital—which takes up roughly 30 percent of Medicare.—versus the first eighteen years of your child’s life in public school.
Even though these battles are being fought today by accountants with calculators, their outcome will be no less important in shaping our nation’s course in the decades to come than the battles of Gettysburg and Bull Run were for the nineteenth century. Many Americans now wrongly believe that the issue we face is whether or not we will reduce the annual federal budget and which programs will get dropped or trimmed. Rest assured, the budget will be cut and programs will be trimmed. The markets will eventually make sure of it. We have no choice.
The important question is: On the basis of what priorities and what vision will those cuts be made? Will we reorganize government spending in a way that invests in the future, or in a way that just pours more money into the past? It is a hard choice. Deserving programs and deserving people will be cut because we simply cannot keep all the promises we have made to ourselves. We have made too many, which are too big, for too long. So if we don’t take the initiative—if we don’t cut spending, increase revenues, and invest in the future all at the same time, based on an accurate reading of the world in which we are living and what we will need to thrive in it—we will pay a huge price. It may be possible to grow effectively without a plan, but there is no way to shrink effectively without a plan.
The fix America is in reminds us of a scene in Orson Welles’s 1958 film Touch of Evil, about murder, kidnapping, conspiracy, and corruption in a town on the Mexican-American border. Welles plays a crooked cop who tries to frame his Mexican