Thomas Friedman and Budget Priorities
A couple of days ago Thomas Friedman wrote one of his typical pieces for the New York Times [NYT January 4th.]. The thrust of his argument was that external threats to American power were less significant than internal threats such as the soaring cost of entitlement programs especially those for health care. He also mentioned a recent book by Johns Hopkins Professor Michael Mandelbaum that suggests American governance of the world is healthy and, as a result, America needs to exert more power not less. He tied the two strands of thought together by highlighting the dilemma America faces and the downside for the world of a poor choice. I think the issues are deeper than he portrays and that Friedman isn’t helping us get clarity.
I think the problem is that America is facing real competition for the first time and it doesn’t like the threat. His argument, which he doesn’t make clearly, is that we will be have to make choices in the future because the competition will force us to. We have a set of budget priorities that are untenable in a globalized economy so we will have to choose between keeping taxes low or raising them, and between entitlement programs and other stuff like defense. The problem is that we thought we could have it all and that the gravy train would never end. Whoops!
Right now we are trying to have it both ways: we want to keep our programs and we want to be the world’s enforcer. In the face of competition we will have to recognize that we can’t do both. That’s a novelty for a country pumped up by its relatively recent ‘conquest’ of the Soviet Union and the attainment of sole super power status. So which is it: cut back our world role and let the Chinese take over as the super power? Or slash back our social programs? My money is that America will do a Europe and go for the former. Maybe we’ll be suffering from French disease — whatever that is — in another 50 years or so.
It didn’t have to be that way of course: we could have kept a tight budget and financed our social programs properly. We could have protected the Social Security trust fund. We could have opted to keep defense spending focused on defense and not offense. We could have developed a more efficient health care program.
That would have meant higher taxes all along, and a recognition that American power was limited. It would have meant cooperating with partners rather than bossing the world around. It would have meant admitting that free wheeling all American capitalism doesn’t always produce the best social results. It would all have sounded so “Old European”. The real American hubris is that the electorate really thought it could have it both ways and it hates to learn that it can’t. So we get angry and lash out at people like Friedman who annoy us because when they try to tell us that.
BTW: the aspect of his column that no one else seems to have commented on in the blogosphere, but really must annoy our foreign friends is the astonishing assumption that he makes regarding world governance. He seems to think the world likes having America act as enforcer [he uses the word ‘governor’ because it sounds more pleasant]. I doubt that they do. It must get a little tiring having all the world’s big decisions being made in Washington where no one outside of America has a vote. That looks and quacks a lot like an empire to me.
