Something's Gotta Give

The premise from which these posts are written is simple: Something’s gotta give.

That’s it.

As a country, America has disliked making choices for several decades. We want lower taxes and more social services. Strong industrial growth and a clean environment. The benefits of two incomes and a stay-at-home spouse. Whether the product of arrogance or American optimism, we have believed that hard choices about the allocation of our resources were unnecessary.

But hard choices are necessary, and avoiding them is not an infinite loop. Eventually those choices must be made, and they only get harder the longer we put that off. Consider a few examples:

• If we had established higher fuel standards 15 or 20 years ago, Detroit automakers wouldn’t have over invested in vehicles with low gas mileage, which combined with the rising cost of energy to kill the sector of the car industry that Detroit relied on most. It would have been a hard decision 20 years ago, but it would have been less painful than the bankruptcies Chrysler and GM are encountering now.
  
• If we had properly established universal health care in the early 90s (when Clinton wanted to do it) or the 70s (when Nixon wanted to do it), our health care costs wouldn’t be spiraling out of control now. There were solutions at the time that would have effectively provided widespread coverage while shifting incentives within the industry to avoid unnecessary procedures. It would have been a hard decision 15 or 35 years ago, but we wouldn’t be faced with a health care industry that eats more of our income every year now.
  
• If we had maintained a budget surplus at the beginning of the decade, we would be in a better position to prop up the economy now without the risk of inflation. It would have been a hard decision 10 years ago to maintain or lower government spending while there was a surplus, but we wouldn’t face the economic hardship or potential for inflation that we do now.

And there are other examples like those. The premise again is that something’s gotta give. Our suggestion is that we should give. For an entire generation.

Americans today should collectively decide to sacrifice for the next 20 years in order to set up the next 100. This is a vague concept that we’ll flesh out with our posts here. But the idea in general is simple. By reducing particular personal and government spending while allowing certain taxes to increase and saving more, we can restore long-term prosperity to the nation. We’ll sacrifice for a generation to save the generations that follow.