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.