That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [97]
The Return of Gravity
For the sixty years after World War II, to be a mayor, governor, college president, or president of the United States involved, on most days and in most ways, giving things to people. For the next decade at least, to be a mayor, governor, college president, or president of the United States will mean, on more days and in more ways, taking things away from people. As our leaders move from distributing generosity to apportioning sacrifice and deciding how much to take away from whom, we have to be much smarter than we have been recently. We have to cut, tax, and invest in ways that will both get our fiscal house in order and reinvest in the elements of our formula for success. Nations that don’t invest in their future tend not to do well there.
That means that every mayor, governor, and member of Congress, not to mention every president we elect, must be guided by this truth: If we keep spending as we have in the past, we are mortgaging—indeed sabotaging—our nation’s future. But if we don’t spend on the right things, something we have generally done since the nineteenth century, we are just as surely mortgaging, and sabotaging, our future. We can no longer avoid making choices. The future depends not only on keeping markets from crushing us but also on upgrading all the pillars of our formula for success. We not only have to get well as a country; we have to get strong again.
Jack Markell, the governor of Delaware, explained to us that he now confronts this challenge every day. “Governing is twice as hard as it used to be,” he said. In the past, “a forward-thinking governor could advance his or her agenda by taking the incremental revenues generated by a growing economy and then have just one fight with the legislature: over where you spend the additional money.” That was because, for most states most of the time—save for a few periods of recession over the last sixty years—governors had steadily rising tax revenues at their disposal. That era has ended. “Now you have to have two fights with the legislature,” explained Markell. “First you have to fight over where the cuts get made and then, once you have freed up the resources, you have to fight over where you spend the money. So governing is twice as hard as it used to be.”
And it is going to get even harder.
In 2010, America was still reeling from the Great Recession and it was unrealistic to expect we would have the budget fight then that we need to have. In early 2011, the struggle got under way in earnest with the bitter wrangle over government funding for the remainder of the fiscal year ending September 30. The government was nearly shut down over whether or not to cut an additional $40 billion from President Obama’s budget. That event marked the beginning of what will be a protracted, difficult, and surely bitter political process to correct the country’s dangerous fiscal course. For that inevitable process, which will surely involve heated and complicated horse-trading before it is completed, we offer four guidelines for America to follow.
The first guideline is the need for seriousness. We face a huge budgetary problem—the product of three decades of gross irresponsibility. Rhetoric, posturing, marginal changes, future targets—none of these will solve this problem. Anyone who proposes solutions that are not at the scale of the problem and don’t require immediate actions is not being serious.
The second guideline involves the purpose of the exercise. It is not simply to reduce the deficit but to ensure prosperity. Solvency is vital, but it is not