The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [69]
The Republican Party isn’t immune from these tensions. With the recent uproar around illegal immigration, for example, Pat Buchanan’s brand of “America first” conservatism may see a resurgence within the GOP, and present a challenge to the Bush Administration’s free trade policies. And in his 2000 campaign and early in his first term, George W. Bush suggested a legitimate role for government, a “compassionate conservatism” that, the White House argues, has expressed itself in the Medicare prescription drug plan and the educational reform effort known as No Child Left Behind—and that has given small-government conservatives heartburn.
For the most part, though, the Republican economic agenda under President Bush has been devoted to tax cuts, reduced regulation, the privatization of government services—and more tax cuts. Administration officials call this the Ownership Society, but most of its central tenets have been staples of laissez-faire economics since at least the 1930s: a belief that a sharp reduction—or in some cases, elimination—of taxes on incomes, large estates, capital gains, and dividends will encourage capital formation, higher savings rates, more business investment, and greater economic growth; a belief that government regulation inhibits and distorts the efficient working of the market; and a belief that government entitlement programs are inherently inefficient, breed dependency, and reduce individual responsibility, initiative, and choice.
Or, as Ronald Reagan succinctly put it: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
So far, the Bush Administration has only achieved one-half of its equation; the Republican-controlled Congress has pushed through successive rounds of tax cuts, but has refused to make tough choices to control spending—special interest appropriations, also known as earmarks, are up 64 percent since Bush took office. Meanwhile, Democratic lawmakers (and the public) have resisted drastic cuts in vital investments—and outright rejected the Administration’s proposal to privatize Social Security. Whether the Administration actually believes that the resulting federal budget deficits and ballooning national debt don’t matter is unclear. What is clear is that the sea of red ink has made it more difficult for future administrations to initiate any new investments to address the economic challenges of globalization or to strengthen America’s social safety net.
I don’t want to exaggerate the consequences of this stalemate. A strategy of doing nothing and letting globalization run its course won’t result in the imminent collapse of the U.S. economy. America’s GDP remains larger than China’s and India’s combined. For now, at least, U.S.-based companies continue to hold an edge in such knowledge-based sectors as software design and pharmaceutical research, and our network of universities and colleges remains the envy of the world.
But over the long term, doing nothing probably means an America very different from the one most of us grew up in. It will mean a nation even more stratified economically and socially than it currently is: one in which an increasingly prosperous knowledge class, living in exclusive enclaves, will be able to purchase whatever they want on the marketplace—private schools, private health care, private security, and private jets—while a growing number of their fellow citizens are consigned to low-paying service jobs, vulnerable to dislocation, pressed to work longer hours, dependent on an underfunded, overburdened, and underperforming public sector for their health care, their retirement, and their children’s educations.
It will mean an America in which we continue to mortgage our assets to foreign lenders and expose ourselves to the whims of oil producers; an America in which we underinvest in the basic scientific research and workforce training that will determine our long-term economic prospects