A friend, reading my last post, asked a good question – if a
candidate were to decide to risk their political future and actually tell the
voters the hard truths, what would those truths be? Here, I suggest, are a few of them:
1. We can’t keep
borrowing 40% of the federal budget each year. In fact, we can’t continue
to borrow ANY of the federal budget each year.
We not only have to stop growing the federal debt, we have to begin to
pay some of it back, to get it back down at least below 80% of GDP within the
next decade or so. That means we have to
cut something like $2 Trillion out of each year’s appx $3.8 Trillion federal
budget – more than half. Yes, that means an awful lot of government workers and
contractors will lose their jobs, and a lot of federal agencies will have to be
downsized or eliminated completely. We might spread the downsizing out over a
few years, and do as much as possible with attrition, but the jobs will have to
go – we simply can’t afford all of them; we are bankrupt as a nation.
2. There is no way to
cut that much out of the budget without reducing Medicare, Medicaid, and Social
Security payments, since these make up close to half (42%) the federal
budget right now. Yes, it will be
painful. Yes, it will require that
seniors pay more for their medical care, and that doctors and hospitals and
pharmaceutical companies figure out how
to cut their costs substantially and live on lower profits. Yes, it will mean
that we can’t all have the very best medical care. That’s the real world – like
it or not. Americans had just better
learn to take better care of themselves, lose some weight, stop smoking, eat
less junk food, and shop competitively for their medical care. The alternative
is to keep going the way we are until the whole system collapse
catastrophically, which would be far, far more painful.
3. Many of the jobs lost in this recession will
never come back. Ignore the glib
promises from politicians about restoring American manufacturing. It just isn’t
going to happen. The world has changed. America can
prosper, and have a wealth of high-paying jobs, if and only if we train up our
young workforce for the technological, innovation-driven, knowledge industries
of today’s world. That means we have to
rethink and renovate our educational system from kindergarten to graduate
schools, whatever the teacher’s unions think, whatever the state and local
educational bureaucracies think, whatever the college faculty councils
think. And we have to do it with about
half the money per pupil we currently spend, which means innovation, not more
money, has to be the solution.
4. We have to cut our
military budget about in half. It can be done, and still leave us with the largest,
best-equipped military in the world. But it means less exorbitantly expensive gold-plated
weapons systems, fewer manned aircraft, fewer military bases, and smaller ships.
It also means politicians (especially Presidents) have to keep a check on their
tendency to use the military to try to solve their foreign policy problems. And
of course it means Congress has to wean itself from the undue influence (and
donations) of the defense industry. Painful, (for a politician) but necessary.
5. We have to revise
and drastically simplify the tax code. America companies spend billions
each year trying to comply with (and evade) the (currently 13,458 page) tax
code. Tax loopholes are so bad that companies like Exxon Mobile and General
Electric can legally pay no taxes on BILLIONs of dollars of income. Yes, lots
of politicians will get heat from corporations and special interest groups who
see their tax loopholes disappearing, but this situation is ludicrous. And yes,
we probably will have to raise the real taxes on everyone, at least for a
decade or so, to help us out of this hole.
6. We have to stop
subsidizing ANYONE. And that
includes the oil and gas industries, farmers, green energy startups, etc, etc. Government
is lousy at choosing the right industries to support anyway – it does it on the
basis of political influence, not facts.
Market forces do it much better. But more to the point, when we don’t
have enough money to do essential things, we can’t afford to keep subsidizing industries
that simply aren’t competitive enough to make it on their own in the markets. And
guess what? A lot of those industries
will discover they can do just fine without the federal subsidies, once they
have the incentive to figure out new, more efficient ways to operate.
That are some of the hard facts an honest politician might
tell his/her constituents, and I bet the majority of politicians know this
perfectly well – they just lack the political will to be honest with the voting
public.
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