The Bankruptcy of a Country

One day after the sixty-eighth anniversary of the Normandy Landings of D-Day and Scott Walker’s Citizens United Victory in the Wisconsin governor recall election, Americans need to look at what is really bankrupting our country. We are not going bankrupt because public sector unions want to ensure firefighters, police, state employees, and teachers a modest retirement based on a lifetime of public service.   

 We are going bankrupt because the middle class has been split through false theories of economics.  As a country we have lost our sense of shared purpose toward a brighter future.  Too much Ayn Rand selfishness and not enough Dwight D. Eisenhower and George S. Patton personal sacrifice for a shared society.

Our nation’s bankruptcy started in the Golden State of California with Proposition 13 based off of the false premise that lowering property taxes would boost economic growth and prosperity.  This premise has since become the religion of the Republican Party, and its sponsor Ronald Reagan the party’s saint.  Yet, the only outcome this Voodoo Economics created is a gutting of our public schools, local police, local firefighters, public parkland, national infrastructure, state budgets, and federal budget.  Combined with the prolific spending of Republican administrations from Reagan onward, the loss of revenue and the increases in spending have thrown our country’s economic future into chaos.

The citizens of California were sold on the idea that selfishness is good.  Then the country as a whole was convinced of the same false economic argument that by cutting taxes all would be well.  Selfishness is not good.   Selfishness does not lead to economic growth.  Selfishness leads to a loss of society as each person fends for themselves and does not care for his or her neighbor.  When the employee of a factory who lost his security fifteen years ago is fighting because his neighbor the teacher still has a pension and he thinks that is unfair, then society as a whole is bankrupt.  Reagan’s revolution split the middle class.  It compelled some in the middle class with dreams of future wealth to resent others in the middle class who hold the promise of stability.  It pitted those having to fend for themselves against those serving the nation through public service at the local, state, and federal level. 

This selfishness created the 401(k) retirement plan, which since its inception has practically replaced the pension as the means of retirement for almost all private sector workers.  Second to tax policies, nothing has divided the middle class more than the loss of a secure retirement.  401(k) plans have proven to be no replacement for pensions as private sector workers who paid into these plans learned in the financial crisis.  Instead, one set of middle class workers has no security and no retirement to rely upon because they were forced into 401(k) plans, while public sector workers have a mix of 401(k) type plans as well as pensions and are more secure in their future.  The argument to eliminate public sector pensions is the wrong one.   

Instead, if the middle class was united, it should be arguing to bring back pensions into the public sector.

Instead of the accolades of sainthood that Republicans hoist onto Ronald Reagan, the country as a whole will come to see him as the most divisive and destructive President we’ve ever had.  We will see his leadership of the State of California as well as of the country as the initial steps towards our moral and financial bankruptcy.  We will see the Reagan Revolution as having split the middle class, cutting it off from the growth of wealth experienced in the United States, and the creator of the greatest wealth gap in our nation’s history since the 1920’s. 

There are steps we can take to return to prosperity and reunite the country.  First we must reunite the middle class.  A strong, well paid, middle class is the most powerful driver of economic growth ever found anywhere in the world.  Reuniting the middle class through the creation of new retirement plans so that everyone can count on stability as they age would be a good first step.  A second would be a return to a progressive tax system where those who’ve benefited most from society pay the most back into it. Finally, as a country, we all need to understand, appreciate, and willingly share our responsibility to pay for the society in which we want to live.  We need to fund our public schools, our police, our firefighters, our public service employees, and our private sector employees.  We need to reclaim the middle ground as a country rather than surrendering our economic well-being to those who do not care for us.

Don’t let the Wisconsin recall make you believe that Voodoo Economics is winning.  It does not have to if you, me, and everyone we know realizes that our country is being lost because we are divided.  Remember the sacrifices on D-Day, when National Guard, Army, Army Air Corps, Navy and Marine Corps troops who represented all of middle class America stormed the beaches of Normandy to free our world from the morally bankrupt Nazi Empire.  The middle class won World War II because it was united.  The middle class can unite again.  If it does so, Americans can win back our country, our society, our stability.  Let’s unite the middle class.  Let’s regain our society.  Let’s save our country.