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Our Country’s Finances
Our country is in a time of transition. World War II devastated the other industrialized countries and left us the undisputed economic and political powerhouse of the planet, but that era has come to an end and a new period of history has begun. The patterns of thought and action that worked well for us in the post-war decades no longer match the realities in this new era, but we haven’t yet found patterns of thought and action that work better. We are experiencing a painful period of cultural lag, when the old models are unsatisfying and new models haven’t emerged.
The signs of trouble are all around us … For more than a generation we have not paid fully for the public services we rely on. Unemployment rates are high and median incomes are falling. Nearly a quarter of our children live in poverty, which bodes poorly for their future productivity and happiness. Income inequality is high and growing, with wide-ranging consequences. Health care costs are breaking budgets at every level, including households as well as local, state, and federal governments. Climate change is producing ever more frequent and expensive storms, floods, and droughts. Much of our physical infrastructure is aged and in need of maintenance or updating. Our schools cannot meet all the demands on them. The anti-tax movement makes it impossible to talk honestly and realistically about state and national finances. Many people are doubting that government can help much at all, or even losing faith in our democratic experiment. And our political leaders often seem completely unable to grapple with these challenges.
To quote Paul Krugman … “Everyone, and I mean everyone, should be engaged in serious soul-searching, asking how much of what he or she thought was true actually isn’t.” (Rabbit Hole Economics)
I am trained as a cultural historian, not an economist. But what cultural historians do is study how people make sense of our complicated world.
In 2000 I began researching and writing a book on the history of Americans’ attitudes about taxes. That book never got finished or published, for several reasons. Among other things, publishers said that no one buys books about taxes.
In January 2011, I led the first of several “experimental economics soirees,” in which I gathered friends and acquaintances to talk about such topics as the federal budget, health care finance, etc. To my surprise and pleasure, these gatherings were popular. It seems that people are wanting to talk and learn, question and explore.
We need, I believe, a new cultural conversation about money and economics, and I hope in my small way to contribute to that conversation. My goal is to understand money and economics, including but not only federal finances, in a way that is both realistic, meaning as true to fact to the realities of the world, markets, and human behavior as I can achieve, and humanistic, meaning putting the good of human beings first, above such things as ideological purity.
One of the topics that needs rethinking, I believe, is what truly makes businesses thrive. People need a healthy economy capable of delivering not just food, housing, and the other requirements of survival, but also opportunities for productive work and ways to fulfill the human desires for community, creativity, beauty, and accomplishment. As Winston Churchill said about democracy, capitalism is the worst economic system except for every other that has been tried.
But there are many different forms of capitalism, and many different ways it can operate. A realistic vision of economics aims to understand the strengths and weaknesses and interconnections among everything – including governments and markets, individual decision-making and emergent phenomena. A humanistic vision of economics doesn’t accept people being burned, and doesn’t decry “the rich” or “corporations,” but tries to figure out how to make capitalism work well for everyone.
This is a tall order, and I can only hope to be a drop in the ocean. But I do believe in our democratic experiment, and I do believe that engaged citizens lead to cultural changes that solve big problems.
I want to be part of that process, and so I invite you to explore with me as I try to learn about where we are, how we got here, and where we might be going. The links below lead to a wide range of ideas and resources from other people, combined with some of my own thinking. This is very much a work in process, but I hope you will find some of these pieces interesting.
The Federal Budget : Where does the money go?
Where Government More Than Pays for Itself : Which programs are especially cost-effective?
Health Care Inflation : The crux of the problem
Social Security : Not the problem, not the solution, but needs tweaking
Military Spending : How do we make it best serve our country’s interests?
Economic & Environmental Sustainability : The economic implications of environmental changes
Our Current Tax System : Where we are now
Raise Our Taxes! : Testimony before the Massachusetts’ Legislature’s Joint Committee on Revenue
Thought Pieces : Articles by other people that got me thinking
Bibliography : Books worth knowing about
Organizations : Where to get more information and/or move into action