Money, Katrina, and Tsongas

The fallout from Katrina continues even as Rita approaches. The storm caught us unawares in many ways. It shook how we see ourselves. It may define what we do as a society for the next few years. The first intallment of this story is the tremendous effort that the Federal government and the public as a whole has made in the last few weeks to make New Orleans right. Much of what has been been done involves money, but the cost and how we will pay it have yet to be determined.

E.J. Dionne addressed some of these issues in this morning's column in The Washington Post. He suggested that the administration's fiscal policy is "stupid." A milder word will not do. I do not disagree. As I wrote him:

"Stupid." Good word; accurate description. But the blame for our fiscal policies can be spread well beyond the White House. No one seems to be willing to stand and say "Tax me, please."

Of course it would be naive to expect that. But who has come out in favor of sacrifice for the goals we seek. We praise the efforts of others in New Orleans and elsewhere (and, indeed, the outpouring of money and effort for the people hurt by Katrina has said much that is good about this country). But who has said that we as a society must tighten our belts for the good of the country? Who has made a modest suggestion that we might cut back for the sake of the future?

Democrats tend to say that the budget deficit can be solved by taxing, in effect, someone else--the rich. (Even the rich think of themselves as middle class.) President Bush, of course, has never asked us to give up anything for the war on terror--or anything else--other than nail clippers at airports.

We all tend to behave as if the bons temps will roll on forever. These "stupid" fiscal policies will guarantee both that they won't and that they will end with something louder than a whisper.

Where are the people who dare to ask us to give up something now to prevent that bang?

In a postscript, I suggested that we may need Paul Tsongas. The Massachusetts senator ran a losing presidential campaign in 1992 and died a few years after. He made no bones about the need for fiscal sanity. He offerred a conservative, straighforward approach to federal spending, arguing bluntly that the budget should be balanced. In a commencement address at MIT in 1989, he said:

In the 1980s we have gone from being the world's largest creditor nation to the worst debtor nation the world has ever known. And all of this debt we give to you, our beloved children. America is on the verge of economic decline. We are now in an undeclared and unfelt and unrecognized battle for our future standard of living.

We had a good run after that. The economy grew at a fantastic pace. As a result, we were able to balance the budget. But that is past, and we stand again where Tsongas saw us more than 25 years ago. Can we revitalize ourselves as we did then? Many of the President's supporters will say we can. I am less certain. There was bipartisan sentiment that taxes could be increased. They were. It cost the older Bush an election. Both parties agreed to budgetary constraints that vanished soon after the new millenium began. Most importantly, we are a country growing old, with a greater share of its resources promised to the old and less productive (this includes me). No one is saying the things that Tsongas did. No one is asking us to serve the greater good before our personal comfort.

Our country may be on the edge of decline, with our place in the world gradually, but perceptibly diminishing. If we are lucky. If we are not, a greater storm than either Rita or Katrina, born of economic difficulty, may engulf us.