Finneran: A Task for Mr. Trump

Friday, December 30, 2016

Tom Finneran, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

He can either kick the can or kick some butt.................

Can-kicking is a D.C. specialty. It’s a long and winding road and most people don’t pay attention, so kicking the can down the road is any easy choice. The fact that it will punish future generations of Americans does not seem to matter to many. The fact that it is the antithesis of leadership is rarely written. The fact that it is problem avoidance rather than problem solving, more Third-Worldly than real-worldly, is a harsh but true judgement.

Here’s the lineup of Democrats and Republicans who have surpassed even Adam Vinatieri as all-star kickers:

Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Barack Obama. These are not Hall of Famers.

The last sixteen years---2000 through 2016/ the “W” Bush and Barack Obama years---have been particularly pathetic to watch. The “can” which they kick of course is the national deficit and its accumulated debt, now hovering just shy of $ 20 trillion dollars. Yes fellow citizens, the word is trillion, with a capital T, otherwise stated as a thousand billions. And you probably thought that your credit cards were badly maxed out............you’re likely a paragon of fiscal virtue compared to these D.C. folks.

For two full generations the country has been spending like a drunken sailor, full of pretense and bluster that we can have it all---war on the cheap, soaring domestic spending, tax cuts, no sacrifice by anyone at any time for anything. It takes an awful lot of liquor for the proverbial drunken sailor to empty his pockets. And when his shore leave is up and those pockets are empty a painful sobriety sets in.

That is not the case in Washington. There they just seem to order more Tito’s, more Jack Daniels, and more ink for the government printing presses, ever oblivious to the cost of their dereliction.

Enter Mr. Trump. Is he aware of the problem? Undoubtedly yes. Does he care about it? I don’t know. As a real estate developer he certainly understands debt and leverage. His recourse to the bankruptcy courts has been a road more travelled for him than for any reader of this column. The omens are not good.

And yet three things just might light the fiscal night in which we’ve wandered for fifty years. Those three things are, first, the hard facts, second, House Speaker Paul Ryan, and third, Mr. Trump’s hopes for a respected place in history.

The hard facts are brutal---$ 20 trillion in national debt and interest on that debt costing us about $ 300 billion dollars a year. That’s $ 300 billion every year, payable to our lenders, and therefore unavailable for road, bridge, and airport modernization. Unavailable for tax cuts. Unavailable for national defense. Unavailable for research and healthcare. Unavailable for cities and states. Unavailable for education. Unavailable for the environment. Unavailable for energy or space exploration. Remember the word—unavailable.

Add in the wrinkle that much of our debt is held by the Chinese, and that much of the annual interest we must pay them is being used by them to address every single one of the needs we neglect. Add in the further wrinkle that current interest rates are stunningly low. Should we ever return to more historic levels of interest rates we will be paying out considerably more every year.........

Speaker Paul Ryan seems to be a sober sensible fellow, a reassuring figure from the ever-sensible Mid-West. He seems to grasp the details of the budget and he seems serious about working our way back to budget sobriety. Wish him well as he embarks on a road less travelled. It will be a long journey for him and for all of us. It is long overdue..........

Mr. Trump has a big ego. All Presidents do. And all Presidents hope for a respected place in history.

It’s not normal for any rational American to consider themselves as presidential material. Normal Americans would shrink from the job itself as well as from the absolutely brutal ordeal of getting elected. Thus it takes a massive ego to even enter the arena. Then, upon election, we tend to put Presidents on an imperial pedestal, adding steroids to their pre-existing egos. Note the swagger of “W” and the cockiness of Obama. Humility is not a strong point for our last two Presidents.

Might Mr. Trump recognize the call of history which is now his? Might he embrace a more serious effort to begin balancing our budgets? He has children and grandchildren and while the Trump clan might be financially secure forever and ever, Trump’s place in history will not be earned by his family’s material comfort. Rather, that place in history might be gained by starting on the hard task of giving future generations of Americans relief from the burdens of kicking cans down the road.

He can either kick the can or kick some butt............

Tom Finneran is the former Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, served as the head the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, and was a longstanding radio voice in Boston radio.