"Everything has a cost. We cannot kid ourselves into thinking that by failing to invest in our future, that we're somehow saving resources -- that we're being clever and somehow saving money." –Gov. Martin O'Malley (D-MD)
If you’re one of those people who think we can solve our national fiscal problems by cutting discretionary spending back to 2008 levels, eliminating foreign aid, getting rid of the Department of Education, cutting back the staff at the House of Representatives, rooting out fraud, waste, and abuse in the Food Stamp program, cutting federal support for National Public Radio and the National Endowment for the Arts, and repealing “Obamacare,” you should take a look at this website: www.federalbudget.com/
This chart showing where the federal government spends its money comes from the National Debt Awareness Center. I don’t agree with all of its principles (it advocates a national sales tax, which I think would be a disaster), but it performs an important public service by updating this colorful chart every month. (I’ve inserted the chart that’s current as I write this. The one on the link is much larger.)
You’ll see that the biggest expenditures are at the bottom, and do not include the items I mentioned above. We spend the most money on the Treasury Department (most of which is interest on the national debt), the Defense Department, and Health and Social Services. In a separate chart below this one is what we spend on Social Security. Those four items are the really big ones.
The reason Social Security is in a separate box is that it’s not a part of the federal budget. It’s still paying for itself, disbursing money it collected in past years, and will continue to do so for a couple more decades. Its eventual insolvency is a serious problem, but one that can be dealt with by raising the limit on the income on which it is assessed. Those who make over $106,800 per year won’t like it, and they do have a lot of political clout, but it is the simplest way to insure permanent solvency of the program. Because everyone came home from World War II and caught up on being fruitful and multiplying, we have a big lump of people retiring for the next few years – like a snake that swallowed a big rat. Raising the maximum wage contribution for Social Security is the least painful way to deal with it, and it can be a temporary increase.
So the immediate problems are human services, defense, and interest on the debt. While axing NPR might make some people very happy, it won’t make a noticeable difference to our deficit. We have to do something about the Big Three.
The current Republican mantra is that our problem isn’t lack of income, it’s excess spending, but that’s simply not true. In order to get a handle on these huge expenditures, we have to increase our income.
It’s common wisdom that we shouldn’t raise taxes during a recession, and I agree, for the most part. It would be like requiring a bleeding patient to donate blood for his own transfusion. So how can we increase our income?
We have to come up with something new. As President Obama put it in his State of the Union address, “None of us can predict with certainty what the next big industry will be, or where the new jobs will come from…. What we can do – what America does better than anyone – is spark the creativity and imagination of our people.”
It might be a breakthrough in solar cells, or high-speed light rail, or cancer research, or three-dimensional imaging, or, after years of promises, fusion power. It might be all of these things and more. It has to be something that helps humanity take the next step. We’ve done it many times before: we’ve had many industrial revolutions in our history, from the Erie Canal to the railroad, the skyscraper, the airplane, the assembly line, penicillin, the transistor, the computer, and the Internet. There’s always a next step.
The president called for increased federal support of education and research, and I agree. And I’d like to see the two combined.
I think the biggest technological advance we could make at this point in our history is finding new ways to educate our children. We do a dismal job of it. Our educational system is still modeled on Henry Ford’s assembly line. We did a much better job when it was modeled on the family garden.
If you grow corn and beans and tomatoes and rutabagas you quickly find that each crop requires different amounts of water, different kinds and application rates of fertilizer, different tillage methods. Some do better in partial shade while others require full sun.
People are similar to plants in that way: children learn in different ways, and the cookie-cutter approach doesn’t work for all of them. Our latest approach has been to define a set of skills students should acquire and then test whether they have done so. We penalize the schools with the highest number of failures, without regard to the many other forces involved. We have stripped our schools of history, music, and art so more time can be spent teaching students to make change and solve simple equations, and they have gotten dumber and dumber. We need something new! Any improvement in the efficiency of our educational system will reap long-term benefits in technical innovation.
There are so many breakthroughs on the horizon, and each one will benefit our economy, but only if we continue to be the ones making a significant portion of the breakthroughs.
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