FOR THE NEW YEAR, A RENEWED AMERICA

Roanoke Times Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc. DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 1, 1992 TAG: 9201020158 SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: HOLIDAY SOURCE: DATELINE: LENGTH: Long

FOR THE NEW YEAR, A RENEWED AMERICA
AMERICA enters 1992 under strange circumstances. On the one hand, the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War have left us the world's sole superpower and affirmed the values and ideals we uphold. On the other hand, a debilitating economic slump lingers.
Worse, we seem to suffer a deficit of confidence and courage. Disaffection from national institutions and uncertainty about the future have conspired, with divided government, to produce a condition bordering on paralysis. The civic currency of our day consists too often of posture and gesture, too rarely of bold purpose or resolute endeavor - witness the spasms of rejoicing when troops are dispatched somewhere.
Invasions aside, America seems largely constrained from acting, even to take advantage of opportunities that global changes offer, even to help itself.
In 1992, Americans should resolve to engage the challenges that face our country, to wring hands less, to shoulder burdens more. This means, in the first place, breaking the deadlock induced by a decade of deficits, and finding ways to make needed investments in our nation's future.
This also means resisting the siren calls of selfish and self-defeating isolationism, nativism and protectionism. Recession or no, we must expose ourselves to global risk, or inevitably fail. We must pursue an active, responsible role in the world to which our fortunes and destiny are bound.
Deferred investments

At home, the backlog of deferred public investments stretches ominously long. America needs to spend on sewers and rails, research and development, education and training. It needs to mount a serious battle against the horrors of poverty, despair and violence enveloping our inner cities.
Yet here we stand, facing a record $350 billion federal deficit. Why the concurrence of deficits and disinvestment? Where did all the money go?
It didn't go to shiftless welfare cheats. More than half of all government income-support payments go to families that aren't poor. The typical welfare payment for dependent children has fallen, since 1970, by more than 40 percent.
A lot of money has gone, on the contrary, to wealthy Americans. If the richest 1 percent - with incomes averaging $675,000 a year - paid taxes this year at the same rate as they did in 1979, the $350 billion deficit would be immediately reduced by $80 billion.
The military has swallowed mountains of money. We now spend $150 billion annually to protect Western Europe against a surprise attack from a Soviet Union that no longer exists. (Russia, by the way, wants to join NATO.) If we spent in 1992 on defense what we spent in the average year of Ronald Reagan's first term (adjusting for inflation), we'd save $40 billion.
Untold amounts over the past decade have gone to government folly and financial piracy. While regulators were leashed and Washington slept, someone ripped off America's savings & loans. The taxpayers' bill: an estimated $500 billion! Take out just the annual interest payment for the bailout, and the federal government would save another $20 billion a year.
Of course, there's always waste. The federal government could save billions by reducing pork barrel, increasing efficiency, and looking for creative ways to promote private solutions instead of feeding the bureaucracy.
And Washington isn't the only place where bureaucracy sprawls. U.S. expenditures on health care have burgeoned, even though some 35 million Americans lack health insurance. An estimated $100 billion of that spending goes annually to administrative costs: red tape and paper-shuffling by myriad insurance companies. A national health plan could save much of that money.
Meanwhile, for all the taxophobia infecting politicians and public, we remain a low-tax nation compared with others in the industrialized world. Why not impose a hefty gasoline tax to encourage conservation and resist global warming while boosting the Treasury?
Yes, America is burdened and limited by the debts it accumulated during the years of borrow-and-spend mania. Not just the federal deficit, but corporate and household debt, will constrain initiative for years.
Yet this richest of all nations is not without resources and options, if we but look for them. The question isn't so much whether we have money to spend; it's what we spend it on.
Wise public investments promise returns that eventually exceed outlays. They help stimulate the generation of wealth; they avoid the need for future, greater expenditures. Thus, building a bridge fosters commerce; spending to repair it saves money down the road.
All of which is obvious, yet not apparently in government. Notwithstanding his express admiration for Head Start, for instance, President Bush has yet to ask that the program be extended to all eligible children. Instead of spending $1 now for preschool education, we end up paying, by one analysis, $4.75 later on special education, crime, welfare and other costs.

Waste not

Of course, no one wants to invest hard-earned dollars in an instrument that squanders them. Government must be able to assure taxpayers that their funds are well-spent. It must try harder to determine what actually works. It must reform campaign financing and reduce the influence of moneyed special interests that now so distorts policy-making.
Just as important, leaders must make the case for investment to an understandably suspicious public. They must explain why buying drug treatment for criminals, for instance, will spare later costs and grief. Too many politicians are content to say "no new taxes" and leave it at that - leaving the public sphere unreformed and uninspired. Let us stop wasting our money, they should be saying, and start investing in the future.
Assuming, of course, that we care about the future. Perhaps we need remind ourselves that what we pass on to our children and to theirs is what America is about. Perhaps we need revive the stigma attached to spending down principal, including natural resources, that otherwise would be left to future generations.
Why not make children Item No. 1 on the national agenda - not just in political speeches and platforms, but in what we think about, what we do, where we focus our resources?
Why not do what we can to promote family togetherness; to raise prenatal and infant health above where it now ranks, appallingly, in the world; to assure high standards of day care and adequate access to it? Why not resolve to do what it takes to make our public schools the best anywhere?
Surely such an investment would pay for itself in productivity, thereby contributing to what ought to be Item No. 2 on the nation's agenda: attending to economic competitiveness.

Marshal strengths

Protectionism, isolationism, nativism - these impulses seem to imply an assertion of superiority over the rest of the world: Our lives and livelihoods are more important than other people's. Yet what they really bespeak is fear and inferiority and defeatism, a cowardice that forgets the lessons, betrays the sacrifices and squanders the legacy of pioneering Americans who bequeathed to us what we possess.
Let us, again, recognize our strengths and marshal them so that we may replenish and buttress what we leave our children. Ours is an awesomely productive nation, the most innovative on Earth. We need not shrink from testing ourselves on the international economic battleground or against global environmental threats.
When Jimmy Carter spoke of "malaise," he was punished politically. But evidence abounds: America is suffering spiritually - even in its hour of triumph, when the Cold War is won. Without the Soviet Union as an enemy, how will we muster our unity? How will we understand our place?
The answer may lie in a catharsis of collective action. Contrary to the nativists, we are not a people as such, but a nation dedicated to, and defined by, certain propositions. Everyone else is beginning to understand that democracy is the greatest form of government humans have fashioned. Let us remind ourselves of that too.
Let us shake off the exhaustion of the Cold War, and the hangover from the '80s, and show the way in a world awakening to freedom. Let us lead the great struggle - not with arms or in hate of other nations, but, in John Kennedy's words, "against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself."

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB