Dan Simpson: For American pre-eminence, the end is near
What's behind the distortion of U.S. priorities that drives us to misuse resources? Old-fashioned fear
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
In spite of the fact that a cold January in this northern city is being made brighter by the successes (cross my fingers, knock on wood, whatever) of the football team, I also have the distinct feeling that Americans in general are very disturbed by what appears to be America's declining relative and absolute position in the world.
The Chinese are slapping us around, even in neighboring Latin America, in the field of finance and trade. The Europeans are working away like happy beavers, building a larger European Union that in its growing strength will come increasingly to serve as a dam against U.S. economic pressure and political influence on individual European countries. The continuing humiliation of the dollar against the euro is sign and seal of that relationship change.
The Iraqis, a nation of 26 million with a pre-war literacy rate of 40 percent, are successfully resisting U.S. will there.
The grim end to this litany of doomsday reasoning can be that the days of the United States, as the sole superpower, as the indispensable player in the world, are numbered: The end is near for U.S. pre-eminence.
Without agreeing with the sticky end for the United States that all the current problems may presage, let's look at what might be our fatal flaws, if they are fatal, if they are flaws in fact.
One is that we scare easily, and thus easily get spooked into stupid, expensive positions and actions. Since 1945 the United States has operated from the assumption that we need a big, expensive military machine, with the very best, cutting-edge weapons in hand, to stay safe. Safe from the Soviet Union and the potential spread of godless communism, safe after 9/11 from terrorism, taking various faces that have included al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein.
On that basis the United States spends breathtaking amounts of money on defense; military budgets only go up, never down; and it is politically impossible to head off any program to develop and produce almost any new weapon, even the Osprey aircraft, which costs $100 million a copy and has a frightful crash record. Another example is the $273 billion intercontinental missile intercept program, which doesn't work and isn't needed but lives on.
It isn't the American military's fault that the government does this. It is unimaginable that military leaders would ever say, "We don't need this new weapon." If they did and something went wrong, for once there might actually be accountability, delivered as punishment after the fact to the unfortunate miscreant. Besides, the defense industry, with its own army of campaign finance providers, would be there to remind the military that they could never be entirely sure that a particular weapon was unnecessary.
So the United States ends up with a $440 billion-and-climbing defense budget, which happens to be even larger than the $413 billion overall U.S. budget deficit, a major part of what is causing the United States massive economic grief around the world.
Thus, our fear that some other country or group might just have more or better weapons creates one major imbalance in what America does with its resources.
The other, more recent distortion of U.S. priorities, again coming from fear, is allowing the cost of health care to soar. In 2003 it consisted of a new high 15.3 percent of gross domestic product. This one is partly fear of death: What if one more test, or one more costly procedure might save me if I fell ill and was approaching consignment to that great boneyard in the sky? Or, be generous, what if grandma could be saved for a few more months by running lots of tubes into her or sawing out part of her, at whatever cost?
Fear. Why isn't America, supposedly the world's most inventive, intelligent country, developing nuclear energy? The Chinese are in the process of giving themselves another five yards' lead on us in the race toward the economic goal line by constructing nuclear power capacity, reducing their dependence on imported oil from the pesky Middle East. Why isn't the United States doing that? Because someone might have died at Three-Mile Island in 1979. Is there any thought that American technology might have been able to figure out a way to plug the safety holes in nuclear power production over the past 25 years? Why does America's leadership let itself be buffaloed by a small number of fear-ridden people?
What should we be spending our money on, instead of a big, expensive military, spiralling medical care costs and unnecessary energy costs?
In my view, America's strength lies in its intellectual capital, in the intelligence of its people, coupled with their indefatigable energy and willingness to work. The answer is education, which seems always to get hind teat when we are allocating resources. This is true on a local, state and national level. To the credit of the Bush administration, it does seem to be paying some attention to the problem of education, although its interest is still a devil's brew of deficit spending, underfunded programs, passing the buck to the states or local authorities, or some scam to persuade Americans that education is one more formerly government-provided social service they should now want to "own."
We haven't had it yet; we will only be over the hill if we don't dump fear as the dominant element in our approach and take these problems by the horns.
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