"All that is old and already formed can continue to live only if it allows within itself the conditions of a new beginning."
It's July 4: Know Where
Your Independents Are?Posted 12:50 p.m., July 4, 2004
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Peter G. Peterson is a Republican investment banker, former Commerce secretary under President Richard Nixon, and co-founder of the moderate, anti-deficit Concord Coalition.
In his new book, "Running on Empty" which was quoted today on the "This Week with George Stephanopoulos," he gives both major political parties the what-for over their failure to take care of the people's business, particularly as it pertains to containing runaway spending that threatens to push the nation to disaster--right about the time that the Baby Boom morphs into the Geritol Boom.
According to its review in Publisher's Weekly, the book says that both major parties are bankrupting the country, warning that mounting national debt coupled with the Senior Boom's coming Social Security and Medicare entitlement tidal wave, portend disaster.
In the face of that, Peterson writes, the GOP has chosen to chase after reckless supply-side economic goals while Democrats refuse to consider limits on entitlements, assuming that a repeal of the Bush tax cuts would merely flash a green light on ever-increased government spending.
Sept. 11 has meanwhile added new burdens, at the same time that European countries, with a population that is growing older as fast as the U.S., probably will have less discretion to spend money for their own security or international aid programs--defaulting those responsibilities to us.
According to the review, Peterson offers concrete solutions such as indexing Social Security to prices, not wages; using the federal employees' health plan as a national model; forcing Congress to include unfunded retirement obligations on its balance sheet; and pursuing more nonpartisan politics--including free TV time during campaigns.
But let's let Peterson tell his own story. I couldn't say it any better than this, so why try? He read the following passages on the ABC-TV Sunday talk show:
This administration and the Republican Congress have presided over the biggest, most reckless deterioration of America's finances in history. It includes a feast of pork, inequitable and profligate tax cuts, and a major new expansion of Medicare that is unaccompanied by any serious measures to control its exploding costs.But let me be clear: The same can be said about a liberal theology that simply brokers benefits among contending pressure groups, conferring entitlements--but not responsibilities; unable to put just claims before merely noisy ones.
In other words, though I often complain about my Republican brethren, I also understand that the Democratic Party has strayed far from its traditional principals.
Both political parties have declared an unholy alliance, an undeclared war on the future. An undeclared war, that is, on our children. From neither party do we hear anything about sacrificing today for a better tomorrow.
-- Peter G. Peterson,
"Running On Empty"
Will the two major parties now in power ever pursue the kind of selfless, self-sacrificing agenda Peterson espouses? Given the twin sciences of polling and parsing that politicians have applied to public policy debate over the past two or three decades, I'd vote no.
Sounds like yet another argument for the emergence of a third party from the sensible center, doesn't it?
But, as the great Minnesota historian Hy Berman recently told me, it would probably take a national crisis--resulting in upwelling of national outrage--to propel such a movement. Hy says the last effective third-party movement, the far-left, Minnesota-driven Farmer Labor Party, was stymied by a non-compete pact between FDR and Minnesota's radical Gov. Floyd B. Olson, who needed federal help to qwell a particularly hairy trucker's strike in 1934. Hy frankly doubts a third-party movement, right, left or center, is even possible anymore.
I dispute that. Unfortunately, I agree it probably would take a monumental governmental funding crisis to move the masses away from either of the major parties. And by then, maybe one of the two major parties will wake up and bust out of the "unholy alliance" Peterson describes, and start forging solutions instead of devil's pacts.
Personally, I'll take those solutions any which way they're offered.
Happy Independence Day.
-- Kevin Featherly|
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Copyright 2004, by Kevin Featherly
