The "Relocating" of America

My last post, America Dislocated, was about how America needs to recover its old, small-town values. I said I believe that our loss of erstwhile small-town values is like a joint that has been dislocated. We've been successfully favoring it for decades, but now it needs to be (painfully) reset.

That is what is in fact in store for us, I said, owing to a huge impending crisis over our national debt. According to Congressional Budget Office estimates ...

From CBO's deficit forecast shows need for early action, Washington Post editorial, Saturday, July 31, 2010

... between now and about 2035 the ratio of federal debt to the size of our economy — the debt-to-GDP ratio — is likely to soar to unprecedented, unsustainable levels. This so-called "alternative baseline scenario"(the top blue line in the graph) could, if everything goes right, fail to materialize ... but even the rosier "extended-baseline scenario" puts debt-to-GDP ratios at levels higher than at any time in our nation's history, with the exception of the period surrounding World War II.

Even the rosier projections involve debt-to-GDP levels that are exorbitant by all peacetime standards, and look like they will continue long into the indefinite future ... unless something is done. What might that something be?

• We can try to head off the crisis by raising taxes, thereby shrinking the annual budget deficits that feed into the national debt.
• We can cut expenditures, with a similar belt-tightening result.
• We can grow the GDP. (If GDP grows, the ratio of debt-to-GDP shrinks.)

Growing the GDP is problematic. If we could do that at will, we'd have no lingering recession today.

Raising taxes is likewise problematic. Republicans emphatically don't want to raise them on the rich, which would happen if the Bush income-tax cuts are allowed to expire on schedule at the end of 2010. GOP members of the House and the Senate would prefer to renew the Bush cuts in their entirety, but, failing that, they would like to renew the Bush cuts as they affect the top two income brackets specifically. Democrats want to keep the cuts for middle-income taxpayers and eliminate them for the top two brackets. Who knows where all this will end up, in a midterm election year?

Cutting expenditures is also problematic. Where do you cut?

• Cutting interest payments on the debt is out, right off the bat.
• So, effectively, are cuts in spending on the military, national defense, and homeland security.
• Cuts in entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare are super-hard to accomplish ... and it is increasing Medicare/Social Security outlays for retiring baby boomers that most threaten to break the bank.
• The recent health care reform package makes things even worse by imposing a yet greater financial burden on Uncle Sam, and even many of its supporters agree that its failure to seriously contain medical costs will have to be remedied in the very near future.
• Remaining items in the federal budget are called "discretionary spending" — and they're almost as hard to eliminate as all of the above. Many of them are instances of "pork," a.k.a. "earmarks," that legislators get inserted in bills to help the folks back home in some way. Constituents love pork/earmarks when their own state or district is benefitted ... and hate it as a general concept when they themselves are not the beneficiaries. But because locally helpful pork gets legislators re-elected, it's nearly impossible to eradicate.
• Much of the rest discretionary spending goes to programs that benefit everybody, such as federal assistance to local schools. You have to be a curmudgeon to oppose that ... or a member of the extreme political right which insists that Uncle Sam has no business telling the states and local school boards what to do to keep the "money tap" open.

Whatever the category of federal spending, it is hard to cut.

Why? At bottom — and this applies even to military, national defense, and homeland security expenditures, most of which wind up in pockets of us Americans here at home — it's because we have developed an "entitlement mentality." Put bluntly, we depend on the federal "money tap" to shield us from our onetime small-town, communitarian obligations.

The urge to leave
Bedford Falls is strong
for George Bailey.

Think of George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life." He wants to leave Bedford Falls, see the world, make his mark on it. And why not? He's seemingly not needed at the Building & Loan his father founded.

But, as it turns out, if he leaves (as he learns from the guided tour an angel gives him of the dystopia Bedford Falls will become if he goes) he will in effect be killing the community his father helped build. Instead, he stays and sets things to rights. Cue the happy ending!

In 1946, when "It's a Wonderful Life" was made, the federal "money tap" had been opened wide due to WWII and, before that, the New Deal during the Great Depression. Frank Capra, the film's director, was clearly worried that America's small towns were dying, as was the sense of communitarian responsibility which George Bailey dodged until set straight by an angel.

After WWII we had ... yet more federal programs. One was the G.I. Bill of Rights that sent returning veterans to college and on to lives in the new suburbs, such as Levittown, that were springing up like mushrooms. Federal largesse grew, and as it grew, it was more than matched by GDP growth for quite a long time, as cheap oil from America and abroad fueled economic progress. (Our "cheap oil tap" was shut off in the 1970s with the first Arab oil embargo.)

But we were also getting warnings, in the form of books like Sloan Wilson's 1955 novel "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit," that there was trouble in paradise. In 1956, the casual, carnal, illicit sex going on among neighbors on Grace Metalious's imaginary "Peyton Place" showed us how a real place like Levittown could turn into the complete antithesis of our old, small-town values.

When we left small-town America behind, three important, and interrelated, things happened:

First, we freed ourselves of strictures that formerly held our individual behavior in check. We became what George Bailey might have become if he had in fact left Bedford Falls.

Second, we accordingly grew able to shine — brightly, individually — and to live unprecedented sorts of lives that were ofttimes super-productive economically, technologically, or in some other important way. But we at the same time became "men in gray flannel suits" — à la the currently popular TV series "Mad Men."

There was, as I say, trouble in paradise.

Third, those who for various reasons were unable to shine in the brave new world we were creating were made wards of the expanding welfare state.

If the welfare state now has to be curtailed to head off a debt-to-GDP crisis — and I think it must — then how will that affect American lives? My hypothesis is that at some point we will have to rein ourselves in, in terms of the individual freedom we have known. It was that freedom which, in effect, allowed us to "leave Bedford Falls behind" and to live life on our own unfettered terms.

Why will that happen? Because we will have to reinstate our presently dormant communitarian values, the ones that prevailed cinematically in Bedford Falls, and actually in the small towns of America's past.

And why will we have to reinstate our dormant communitarian values? Because the only alternative would be, as the federal money tap dries up, the dystopia which George Bailey's angel showed him.

Nobody wants that.



***

But we have to be on guard here. Small-town values have traditionally been narrow-minded values.

Nobody ought to want those again.

I talked in my earlier post about a recent Washington Post op-ed piece by Kathleen Parker, Olive Street, by heart, which extolled her tiny three-block enclave in Washington, DC. On Parker's street ...

Olive Street, NW
in Washington, DC

... the people are kind. The kind people of Olive Street include (gasp!) a pair of gay men, next door to Parker, who have been together for a quarter century. They also include those who, like Parker, help watch over neighborhood children whose ethnicity (gasp! again) is not the same as that of their adoptive parents. Would such families fit in, in Bedford Falls?

They are going to have to fit in, in a "relocated" America.

I see the "relocating" of America as upholding the good, communitarian values of our small-town past and as refusing to uphold the narrow-mindedness of that past.

For Joel Fleischman, it's
4,000+ miles back
to the Big Apple

Remember "Northern Exposure," the early-1990s TV series? The denizens of fictional Cicely, Alaska, were about as variegated as those of Olive Street, Washington, DC, but that didn't matter: they somehow coexisted as an egalitarian, big-tent community.

Dr. Joel Fleischman, fresh from from New York and medical school, had managed to get deposited there and desperately wanted to get away. A lucrative career awaited elsewhere. But he was under contract; he had to stay. As he became unwillingly enmeshed in the Cicely community, he learned values of self-denial, mutual caring, and communal integrity that he'd never imagined as a medical student.

We are about to become Joel Fleischman ... all of us. We are about to be permanently relocated to community-minded, tolerant, self-sufficient Cicely, AK.

This has to happen: the federal money tap is about to dry up. We, in all our variegated diversity, are going to need a resuscitated Bedford Falls Building & Loan — a metaphorical stand-in for local, communitarian spirit  — to come back to life and help us over the rough patches, real person face-to-face with real person.

America Dislocated

Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye,
But hold on to your lover,
'Cause your heart's bound to die.
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town.
Can't you see the sun's settin' down on our town, on our town,
Goodnight.
—Iris DeMent, "Our Town"

Post
Columnist
Kathleen
Parker

In a recent Sunday Washington Post, in Olive Street, by heart, 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Kathleen Parker is right on target: Today's America is pining away for lost small-town values.

Parker describes an idyllic three-block-long enclave in Washington D.C. where she has nurtured her own personal desire for community for the past four years. Then, after extolling Olive Street's virtues, the columnist reveals she is pulling up stakes for "a much bigger town — New York City — to begin a new adventure."

In the Big Apple, will she find next-door neighbors like Jack and Craig, who took her in the night a friend died? Among the "daily expressions of what it means to be human" that Parker attributes to this gay couple of 25 years' standing have been ...

... the dozens of times I knocked on their door to say, "I'm hungry and out of food," knowing they would say, "You're in luck!"

Will Parker find in NYC another ...

... Meaghan, a widow [who] went to Guatemala to adopt Josephina, who, now bilingual and a determined tricyclist, has become the block's child. Not long ago, Meaghan married Nigel, who added Reagan and Drew to our neighborhood brood.

Maybe Parker will find another Olive Street. Or, maybe not.



Another piece from the same Sunday Post, Crafton family enjoys rare closeness after seven years together at sea, tells of a family-of-five who bought a double-masted, oceanworthy sailing vessel in 2003 and, with several months-long stays in various island communities en route, took it all the way around the world. Dad, Mom, two teenage girls and one teenage boy, living and sleeping together in a cabin no bigger than a hotel bathroom ...

The Craftons in their cabin

... and they had the time of their lives.

What's leaving America entirely and then enduring the culture shock of coming back home after several years away have to do with small-town values? Three things. One: father Tom Crafton reports, "The day we moved onto the boat, the sibling rivalry stopped. I don't think [the kids] ever complained, not once." Two:

Vanuatu, where the people owned the least and smiled the most, was one of their favorites [among stopping off points]. They stayed three months. "They are the happiest people in the world," Tom says. "It reinforced everything we believed about putting time with the family over this blind pursuit of material things."

Small-town values — Vanuatu is essentially a small town on a tiny island — are family values. Three:

Rudest encounter: a few days after reaching Maryland [upon their return home], when a cranky boat owner warned Jena and Ben to keep their rowboat away. "I can't remember a mean word anywhere else on our trip," Tom says. "We're relearning how things are around here."

Williamsburg
reenactor

Yet another article in the same edition of the Post, "Tea party" activists drawn to Williamsburg and its portrayal of Founding Fathers, talks about a recent influx of sometimes temper-toting tourists to Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, where scenes of our country's founding are reenacted daily. These members of the Tea Party movement are ofttimes speaking up, and out, at the reenactments:

They clap loudly when an actor portraying Patrick Henry delivers his "Give me liberty or give me death" speech. They cheer and hoot when Gen. George Washington surveys the troops behind the original 18th-century courthouse. And they shout out about the tyranny of our current government during scenes depicting the nation's struggle for freedom from Britain.

"General, when is it appropriate to resort to arms to fight for our liberty?" asked a tourist on a recent weekday during "A Conversation with George Washington," a hugely popular dialogue between actor and audience in the shaded backyard of Charlton's Coffeehouse.

Standing on a simple wooden stage before a crowd of about 100, the man portraying Washington replied: "Only when all peaceful remedies have been exhausted. Or if we are forced to do so in our own self-defense."

Williamsburg tourists being instructed
in using a musket

In pre-Revolutionary America, Colonial Williamsburg was a small-town seat of local government set in a farming community. Thomas Jefferson, who lived at Monticello, another dot on the map in Virginia, was a farmer.

Add all three of these recent Post pieces together, and you get an indictment of today's dislocated America. If you don't actually live in a small town — as few of us do today; this blogger comes from small-town people but has never himself lived in a small town in 63 years — you have to be extremely lucky to find an Olive Street where you live. You have to go to great lengths, such as sailing the whole family around the globe in a cramped twin-master, to put aside today's hyper-material culture and bond tightly with your own kin. And you are likely to be increasingly angry that the simpler America Jefferson and others knew has vanished.

Ex-Alaska
governor
Sarah Palin

Which is why this blogger thinks Sarah Palin will be elected our next president in 2012.

I think of Palin as Ronald-Reagan-in-a-bra — which, for all you misogynists out there, is not meant as a slight or a slap against the former Alaska governor and GOP vice-presidential candidate. This country is overdue for a female chief executive, and I think Palin will presently become its first.

President Reagan was much like Palin in many ways. He had little grasp of the nuances of current affairs in the 1980s and was the exact opposite of a policy wonk. Ditto, Palin. (Except that both were/are much smarter than we liberals give them credit for. It was just that they had/have the gift of sieving out the daily buzz that stands in the way of their enacting their guiding principles, whatever they actualy are. We'd all be better off if we had a little of the same.)

Reagan was a consummate actor, folksy and telegenic. Ditto, Palin — though she has never been paid to read lines in movies and on TV, as Reagan was for decades. Palin is simply a natural at it — as was the young Reagan. He just happened to stumble into a profession that gave him an outlet for his inborn acting bent.

Then he stumbled into another: politics. Reagan the politician could come up with lines, pithy and humorous, that epitomized what he wanted to make us believe he stood for. Ditto, Palin.

Reagan:

Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.

Palin:

I love those hockey moms. You know what they say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull is? Lipstick. 

Reality check time:

• Under Reagan, the national debt ballooned as a percentage of GDP. Reagan wanted to convince the Soviet Union, through an American arms buildup, that we were dead serious about opposing the "evil empire." Reagan also wanted smaller, cheaper government, true, but he wanted to scare the communists in Moscow even more.
• We have yet to see which of her pet convictions Sarah Palin will sacrifice in the name of ... well, of whatever it is that really motivates her. We do know (see Anne Applebaum's recent Post op-ed piece, GOP shows historic amnesia on spending cuts) that "as mayor of Wasilla, Sarah Palin hired a former [ex-Alaska Senator Ted] Stevens chief of staff to be a Washington lobbyist. As a result, the 6,700 inhabitants of [Palin's own small town of] Wasilla enjoyed $27 million in federal earmarks over a four-year period." That's over $1,000 of federal largesse per Wasilla resident per year!

Still, even if she's not always made good on her small-govrnment rhetoric, it's clear to me that Palin marches to the beat of her own drummer — as did Reagan — and will not be hemmed in as president (should she be elected) by the Tea Party movement or anything else.

How American, by the way, for Sarah Palin to have a quintessentially small-town independence from any and every mainstream set of beliefs and constraints that may come down the pike.

President
Barack Obama

President Obama, whom this blogger adores, will, in 2012, lose to Palin because he has taken on the thankless task of trying to heal the side effects of the dislocation of America without necessarily fixing the dislocation proper.

Small-town, Main Street America would never have produced the fat cats on Wall Street who made a financial balloon out of "bad paper" — subprime mortgages that no local savings and loan would have countenanced — and inflated it to the point where it burst, taking the economy down with it. Now Obama, with his bailouts and stimulus plan, is trying to patch things up and put Americans back to work. But what he doesn't seem to get is that Americans want their jobs back, sure, but they also want to get back to small-town values that the faceless Wall Street fat cats, like other miscreants before them, have blithely detonated.

In a small town, everyone takes care of everyone. When people are down on their luck or in poor health, other people step in to help. Today, with that small-town mentality a perennially endangered species, we need hugely expensive, massively intrusive "Obamacare" health reforms, bailouts, stimulus plans, etc., etc., etc., in lieu of what was once the American way of life.

We now face a ballooning of the national debt over the next decade or more that will make the Reagan balloon in the 1980s, extending as it did into the 1990s, look like a baby bump. By 2020, if things don't go exactly right — and they won't — our national debt as a percentage of GDP will dwarf even that of the World War II period:

From CBO's deficit forecast shows need for early action, Washington Post editorial, Saturday, July 31, 2010

That steeply rising top blue line which will breach a debt-to-GDP ratio of 150 percent by about 2030 is the Congressional Budget Office's "alternative baseline scenario." It will be, says the Post editorial cited in the caption, what happens if our political leaders wimp out and extend the Bush tax cuts, index the alternative minimum income tax to the rate of inflation, and fail to reduce Medicare payments to doctors dramatically. But that's not the main point. Even if those bad choices are avoided in the short term ...

... growth in spending on federal health-care programs and Social Security would drive up debt to about 80 percent of GDP by 2035. That is, actually, the rosy scenario.

In Reagan's time, debt-to-GDP never got above 50 percent.

The CBO's best case/worst case scenarios reflect the huge cost, I'd say, of trying to use big government to offset our loss of small-town values. Small-town America would never pollute the well everyone drinks from, but our pollution levels today threaten to inundate coastlines everywhere with polar icecap meltdowns due to global warming. The Tea Party right resists believing that because ... because what, after all, is the proposed solution? More massive government intrusion in the form of a carbon tax — whether it's an explicit one or a hidden one that emerges from a cap-and-trade system!

The CBO's frightening debt-to-GDP predictions largely reflect spending on federal health-care programs and Social Security as the baby boomers retire. Those programs are, I'll say again, substitutes for having a "small-town someone," perhaps kinfolk nearby, who will set aside their own private pursuit of more and more "stuff" and take care of you in time of sickness, old age, or economic need. Social Security was a product of the New Deal in the Great Depression, which in the graph above shot America's debt-to-GDP upward to then-unprecedented heights. This was also a time of massive human dislocation: think of the small-town Okies forced by adversity to migrate from the Dust Bowl to California.

Sign of the times
in the 1970s

That there was not a similar blip in the 1960s, when Medicare began as part of President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society initiative, is very likely a reflection of strong GDP growth during that era — fueled by cheap petroleum, a sweet situation that ended abruptly in the 1970s with the first Arab oil embargo. Since Reagan, the only period in which debt-to-GDP has shrunk has been under President Clinton. As Anne Applebaum points out in GOP shows historic amnesia on spending cuts, President George W. Bush, supposedly a small-government consrvative, expanded government spending ...

... by an extraordinary 104 percent. By comparison, the increase under President Bill Clinton's watch was a relatively measly 11 percent (a rate ... lower than during Ronald Reagan's). In his second term, Bush increased discretionary spending — that means non-Medicare, non-Social Security — 48.6 percent. In his final year in office, fiscal 2009, he spent more than $32,000 per American, up from $17,216.68 in fiscal 2001.

It's only gotten worse under President Obama, says Applebaum, "the Obama administration is far more profligate than Clinton or Bush, terrifyingly so."

So it looks to me as if the so-called welfare state, full of ever-expanding federal entitlements, is a dangerously overinflated tire that has already been patched too much. It looks as if the only way to avoid a blowout is to get debt-to-GDP radically back in check — which is going to mean massive new tax revenues, as well as cutbacks in "discretionary spending" and maybe even in entitlement benefits and eligibility.

Or, put it another way: It looks like the only really effective way to deal with the coming debt-to-GDP threat — given that new taxes and spending cutbacks are, both of them, political poison pills in today's culture of dependency on Uncle Sam's largesse but resentment of the tax hikes which, short of going further into debt, are necessary in order to pay for it — is to somehow reconstitute small-town values in America. To eliminate the need for massive federal entitlements in the first place, by making people's general welfare a matter of local, face-to-face concern.

Sign of the times
in the 1930s

Our society, I am coming to believe, has been "dislocated" and "out of joint" since at least the New Deal under Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, when Uncle Sam began taking responsibility for helping Americans who could no longer rely on local, face-to-face charity to keep them afloat in hard economic times such as the country had never seen before.

It was a pragmatic response to being between a rock and a hard place, economically and socially. Local, face-to-face concern for one's hard-luck neighbors was not going to get the job done. The federal government had to step into the breach. The New Deal didn't so much set our country's "dislocated joint" properly as give us a crutch so we didn't have to walk on it.

I think that in view of the debt-to-GDP crisis that loom just ahead of us, we now need to reset the nation's "dislocated joint" properly, for a change — which, like all joint resettings, will unfortunately involve a lot of short-term pain and will require a physician (our political leadership) with great courage and resolve.

By "resetting the joint" I mean weaning ourselves off federal largesse and reinstituting the small-town concern for our neighbors' welfare that is the best — nay, only — real alternative. No one says that will be easy.

This need for short-term pain on the part of the populace and political courage on the part of its leaders is what just about all of the ambitious Obama agenda is trying to head off, through ever greater federal tinkering with the way things get done in this land, and also with what things (eschewing health insurance, for instance) Americans are allowed to do.

This insistence on re-patching a bulging, unpatchable tire is what Sarah Palin symbolically stands against. What she symbolically stands for — whatever her actual record as mayor of Wasilla — is a return to America's small-town values and a concomitant reduction in the size of federal discretionary (and even entitlement) outlays.

That's why I think she'll be our next president, come January 2013.