RUNNING ON EMPTY: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do about It - Softcover

Peterson, Peter G.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312424620 ISBN 13: 9780312424626

Verlag: Picador, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

The national bestseller, described by Tom Brokaw as the "wake-up call we cannot ignore," with a new preface by the author

Acclaimed by all sides of the political spectrum, Peter Peterson's Running on Empty not only traces the deterioration of America's finances but offers solutions. This national bestseller is required reading for everyone concerned with America's long-term economic survival. In clear and concise prose, Peterson offers America not only a vision but the practical steps by which to ensure our children's economic future. Running on Empty is not only a warning, it is also a manifesto calling for the next administration to finally confront a deep and disturbing problem that politicians of all parties have insisted on ignoring for too long.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter G. Peterson is the author of Gray Dawn: How the Coming Age Wave Will Transform America--and the World. He is chairman of The Blackstone Group and chairman
of The Council on Foreign Relations.

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Running on Empty

Chapter 1

BANKRUPT PARTIES, BANKRUPT NATION

When the towers fell, I was out of town attending a corporate board meeting (which promptly adjourned) and spent the rest of the day watching cable news and trying to call my wife and family in Manhattan. Four days later, when I finally managed to get a plane home, I saw a New York--and an America--transformed. I saw parents doting on their kids and neighbors helping neighbors and college students lining up to donate blood and cars and streets in a sea of flags. Out of tears and tragedy there came a new sense of community purpose and determination. Like many Americans, I asked myself, Why can't citizenship in a great nation always be like this?

But within a few months our leaders had reverted to their old habits. The nastiness returned. It was business as usual--the same politicians leaping at each other's throats while saying nothing sensible about what America can do or be.

This brought home for me why a growing number of Americans are so disaffected with politics and parties. There seems such a vast gap between what our democracy ought tobe and what it is, between the decency of ordinary citizens and the horrible warping of their votes and desires once they get translated into partisan politics. It's gotten so bad that millions of Americans who once worked, led, and campaigned for our major political parties have severed--or are at least rethinking--their attachment to them. These Americans once served as full-fledged "Republicans" and "Democrats." But a growing number now doubt their affiliation. They no longer want to belong to either camp--or at least want to remove the insignia from their old uniforms.

My own example is instructive. As a Republican, I have served as a cabinet member (once), as a presidential commission member (three times), as an all-purpose political ombudsman (many times), and as a relentless crusader for fiscal responsibility whom some would call a crank (throughout). During most of my service, I have been careful not to subscribe to party dogma that violated my common sense, nor assume that a constituency is sacrosanct just because the party says so, nor believe that the other party is automatically the enemy. Yet that's just the problem. Increasingly, those who serve my party are subject to all of these pressures. And I know many Democrats who feel just as I do about their own party.

I believe this political dysfunction poses a clear danger to our nation. It does so by paralyzing our capacity to make elementary fiscal choices--the kind of choices, which, if left unmade by a person or family, would quickly lead to ruining their career or their life. First we had the ideologues of tax and spend. Then we had the ideologues of don't-tax and spend. Today, both have triumphed, with the result that the United States is committed to spending literally trillions of dollars more in personal benefits and collective security over the coming decades than citizens either expect or can afford to pay. The Democrats and the Republicans, with their lopsided and mutually irreconcilable worldviews, have found only one important way to compromise, and this is for both sides to takewhat they want (low taxing and high spending) and send the bill to our kids. These two parties have launched America into the new century on a course of vast and mounting budget deficits which, if left unaltered, can only end in an economy-shattering crisis or crushing burdens on America's younger generations--or both.

Steered by bankrupt parties, in short, we will soon become a bankrupt nation. That is what this book is about.

What Went Wrong with the Party of Abraham Lincoln

I have been proud to be a Republican. For me, the Republican Party has always embodied the unique American dream of self-direction and unlimited individual achievement--even for those of very modest means (as was my own parents' family). Republicans believe that being a citizen of a "republic" entails duties as well as rights.

Fiscal stewardship has likewise been a bedrock principle of the Grand Old Party since its origins in the 1850s. Republicans have traditionally believed that America should invest in the next generation and that good citizens should never allow government to undermine such efforts by burdening posterity with unsustainable liabilities. When debts are incurred, they are to be paid back as soon as possible. At various times in our history (especially after wars), Republican leaders have honored this principle by advocating and legislating painful budgetary retrenchment, including spending cuts and tax hikes.

At times they overdid a good thing. Herbert Hoover (the only former secretary of commerce to win the presidency, I note without comment) has rightly been condemned for pushing fiscal restraint when he should have been pushing fiscal stimulus. Blame him, if you will, for the severity of the Great Depression or for worshipping at "the temple of the balanced budget." But don't blame him for his intentions--and don'tblame the Republican Party for principles of fiscal responsibility that have helped make America the most envied and future-oriented nation on earth. Principles are important only to the extent that they restrain us from what we might otherwise find tempting. Over much of its history a younger, less educated, poorer, and sometimes desperate America was no doubt tempted to borrow from the affluence they (rightly) expected their offspring would someday enjoy. But the people and their leaders chose not to. And today we thank them for it.

Over the last quarter century, unfortuantely, the Grand Old Party has abandoned these original convictions. Without ever renouncing stewardship itself--indeed, while talking incessantly about legacies, endowments, family values, and leaving "no child behind"--the GOP leadership has gradually embraced a more indulgent fiscal philosophy. It now seems to believe that deficit spending energizes America by liberating taxpayers from the need to pay their own way. Deficits have become like aspirin, a sort of fiscal wonder drug. We should take them regularly just to stay healthy and take lots of them whenever we're feeling out of sorts.

With the arrival of Ronald Reagan in the White House, this idea was first introduced as part of an extraordinary "supply-side revolution" in fiscal policy, needed (so the thinking ran) as a onetime fix for an economy gripped by stagflation. To those who worried about large and chronic deficits, they said, Relax, it won't happen--we'll "grow out of them." But we didn't. During Reagan's administration the federal government borrowed more from the public (in inflation-adjusted dollars) than it did during all of World War II. For the first time in U.S. history, people began to explain large swings in interest rates, the stock market, and the exchange-rate value of the dollar by pointing to large, erratic jumps in federal indebtedness.

After George Bush, Sr., famously broke his promise of "no new taxes" in 1990, he lost his party's right wing immediately--and his presidency two years later. Tax cuttingthereafter became the GOP's core platform. By 1996 even Bob Dole, who had been a leading deficit hawk during the 1980, ran for president as a supply-side evangelist. A growing number of Republican leaders argued that deficit finance was nearly always a permissible strategy, though much of this bold talk could be excused as the bluster of a party that didn't have to lead the country. Then, with the Republican takeover of the White House in 2001, the party's tax cut agenda ascended to a new level of irresponsibility. For the first time ever, a Republican leadership in...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Picador
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0312424620
• ISBN 13: 9780312424626
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 294
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland