Tom Finneran: Broke! Dumb! Doomed?

Friday, May 17, 2013

Tom Finneran, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

My country ‘tis of thee, sweet land of lunacy, of thee I cringe....

America is broke. Desperately, historically, frighteningly broke. We are borrowing forty percent of every dollar we spend on the federal level and our national debt should be a colossal embarrassment to anyone associated with it. I’m not here to allocate blame right now. Last week I pointed out the George W. Bush’s stewardship as President was spectacularly inept on controlling spending and debt. And his Republican allies in Congress were silent but willing accomplices in a series of budget charades .But let’s not pick on George alone. My own party, the Democratic Party, might be worse. Apparently addicted to tax increases and apparently unwilling to say “no” to any spending request, the Dems bear as much responsibility as the Republicans in creating this terrible American mess.

You know we hear all the time that an essential part of the American dream and our quality of life is that each generation of Americans has been determined that the next generation of Americans—i.e.—their children—will have a better and an easier life. I think that we can drop that stale old tale now. Since the 1960s, through Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama we have screwed multiple generations of young Americans because we refuse to pay for what we consume. Seven Democratic presidential terms and seven Republican presidential terms have, since 1960, shown an across-the-board collapse of responsibility. The multiple Congresses since 1960 bear equal blame. But, neither the presidents nor the Congresses show any shame. Instead, excuses and rationalizations abound. It is not a pretty picture and our children might rightfully curse their fate as the children of an incredibly wayward generation. We’ve partied hard for fifty plus years and we wouldn’t even pay the bar tab. We are pathetic. And we are broke.

America is dumb too. Really dumb. We’re dumb at two levels. The first level is that apparently the American people are just too stupid to figure out the basics of buying a house, or eating a meal, or staying in school, or getting some exercise or countless other things that an ordinary fifth-grader understands. Thus we get, from the brokest nation on Planet Earth, a series of ads about things that are a) already understood by everyone from simpletons on up and b) none of the federal government’s business in the first place. Why oh why is the brokest nation in history spending a single dime on this nonsense? Listen as I do to a wide variety of radio stations when you’re in the car and you’ll realize that your money is being spent by many agencies whose messages don’t even rise to the level of trite. On several occasions in the last six months I have heard five or six of these government-sponsored ads in a row! This is truly nanny state nonsense. The government telling you in effect to “eat your peas”, “change your socks”, etc……………

And so we come to the second level of dumb, which is our failure to see and understand the link between our debt and these inane ad campaigns. We spend money which we do not have on messages we do not need. Of course we could demand a refund for such idiocy but we never paid for it in the first place. Rather, we borrowed the money from the Chinese and now our children will have to pay it back. These ad campaigns are a symptom, a symptom that America is addicted to spending, averse to paying, and very very sick.

Are we doomed? I’m an inveterate optimist and so I hesitate to write America’s obituary. As Bismarck once observed, “God is good to children, drunks, and the United States”. Maybe we’ll smarten up. Maybe we’ll get lucky. I raise the issues of our debt and our collective stupidity because they are incredibly detrimental to our children’s futures. It’s as if we are determined to go down as the most selfish generation in the nation’s history, with no regard at all for the legacy and lessons we are imparting to future generations. And yet, the members of Congress whom I know, both Democrats and Republicans, are bright hard-working folks who seem to understand that we cannot continue on our current path. Nor should we be gambling our future wellbeing on the bet that other nations will be even more reckless and dissolute than we are.

America was once taken seriously both at home and abroad. I’m not so sure that’s the case today. And I don’t like it when my country becomes a punchline and a joke.