Why We Need a More Reasonable Political Discourse

NPR reporters John Ydstie and Scott Horsely spoke on Weekend Edition last Sunday about the meeting of the president's debt commission this week. They described some interesting findings.

First, when we talk about the US "debt problem," we really are referring to several separate but related phenomena. One is the profligate personal spending individual Americans did in the first decade of this century. The home loan crisis stems from this problem, and according to the Scott Horsley, that problem should resolve itself more or less on its own as the economy recovers. That's not to say that the improvement will come without pain, but further government intervention in this sphere is probably not necessary.

A second debt problem is with Social Security and Medicare, which comes as a result of the growing population of elderly in the country. The Medicare problem will be difficult, says Ydstie, because as the cost of health care rises, the demands on the federal welfare program increases. Social Security, on the other hand, could be fixed with relatively mild tax increases and/or benefit reductions.


The big debt problem, though, is the federal deficit, which comes from huge unfunded expenditutres on two wars, two large tax cuts and the costs of the bank bail out. This debt makes fixing other problems even more difficult because the federal government, ordinarily the entity with the deepest pockets, can spend nothing or next to nothing.

And here's where political discourse matters. We must reduce the federal deficit, just as the TEA Party group says we must. The Republicans are absolutely right that we have to cut some federal spending. But it was Republican-sponsored tax cuts and Republican spending on two wars, at least one of which was entirely discretionary, that put us into this hole. For the Republican Party to call Democrats tax-and-spenders is disingenuous at best and deliberately dishonest at worst. On the other hand, Democrats have to learn how to handle power and stop apologizing to people all the time. The federal government may not be the best solution to the problem of how to suppirt and educate the poor, but the consensus now is that only the feds can pull us out of a health care crisis. Democrats must assert themselves with fact and confidence rather than crying to each other about how no one will listen to them.

We have to talk to each other to solve these problems.