Things Are Rarely as Good as You Hope, nor as Bad as You Fear

“The forest was shrinking, but the trees kept voting for the axe, for the axe was clever, and convinced the trees that, because his handle was made of wood, he was one of them.” -Turkish proverb

And, indeed, who is the forest, but we hopeful Americans, having voted for half a century of axes from our two-party system?

There was a time, and I knew it well, when Republicans wore the wire-rimmed glasses of conservative businessmen. I was one of them. I had Democrat friends, union supporters who felt the worker class were being left behind in our postwar 1950s industrial period. I was one of them as well.

Those were great times in America, and I don’t say that because I read about it somewhere. I say that because I lived it, running my small construction business, catering to the wealth of those days, millionaires before such a wild concept as billionaires. A thousand times a millionaire? Impossible, one couldn’t even wrap one’s mind around such a silliness.

We’re told we cannot go back, that these are different times

And, different they certainly are, which has very little to do with going back, and even less to do with moving forward.

These are times of national debt, where there was none; untaxed wealth, when everyone then paid their share; booming industrial strength, now shipped to China; university for all comers, now reserved for the rich; solid infrastructure, abandoned at the moment; bipartisan politics, lost and gone forever; single earner family security, destroyed along with the reality of doing better; the family doctor privatized into healthcare for profit; and kids enjoying a kid life.

Let’s examine those claims

A) National debt: A graduated income tax kept us out of debt until restraint began to waver in the 1960s with the cost of the Vietnam war plus the cost of “Great Society” social programs. It all really began to collapse in the 1970s and has never recovered. But the seventies, you will remember, were the prequel to the Reagan years. The last president who balanced budget and paid down debt was Bill Clinton, not because he was a fiscal genius, but because the economy was strong.
Republicans now focus on tax cuts and Democrats on social spending. Republicans insist that economic growth will eventually balance the budget, which it won’t, while Democrats claim deficit spending doesn’t matter, that it’s just numbers, not real money.

B) Untaxed wealth: The graduated income tax, which garnered income sufficient to bear the costs of government, was nibbled to death across several decades by Republicans, with the full support of Democrats. Trickle-down tax breaks trickled all advantage upward and all obligation down, where there were no sources but deficit.

C) Industrial strength: The Reagan years essentially turned us from producers to shopkeepers, by breaking the unions and promoting international trade. The shift of production to China (Nixon) redirected industrial wealth to the ‘investor class,’ an open door to billionaires.

D) University education: I attended Michigan State University in the 1950s, at an annual cost of $2,500. Average university cost today is $30,780 today, leaving 43.6 million American students owing $1.753 trillion.

E) Infrastructure: Fourfold population increase (from two to eight billion) hasn’t helped, but maintaining sewer systems and bridges isn’t a popular political subject today, because most ‘stuff’ will not collapse before the next election cycle. That’s why Chicago’s water systems were last upgraded 117 years ago.

F) Bipartisan politics: If one must name a year for its collapse, 1964 will do. The Civil Rights Act of that year involved a different kind of bipartisanship requiring real compromise and courage. When finally signing it, President Johnson declared, “there goes the South for Democrats forever.” There went bipartisanship as well.

G) The demise of the single wage-earner family: Lots of ghosts here. Destroying the industrial economy heralded the end of the boat in the driveway of a line-worker, and the demise of unions drove a final spike in the coffin of the middle class.

H) The privatized family doctor: The murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is top news today, but the outrage of American healthcare costs, pharmaceutical profits, and insurance premiums is fresh in the mind. Our family doctor, Wayne Fox, used to visit our home when I had a cold, and he was there when my mother died, twenty years later. Much water under that bridge.

I) Kids enjoying a kid life: I was brought up in one house, in Evanston, Illinois until I was twenty-two, and off on my own. No play-days and chauffeuring off by mom from event to event in those times. My kid life parodied Frank Sinatra: “When I was ten years old, it was a very good year, a year of slammed screen-doors and fireflies, idle friends and underground forts.” But I was lucky, and I knew it. We were an arms-around-each-other family, full of love and the time to express it.

There isn’t an item on that list that can’t be gone back to

Don’t let anyone tell you different.

Don’t let anyone erase your American heritage.

Times ahead are not as bad as you fear. What did FDR tell us? “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”