Commentary: The Federal government can’t save our country from the relative decline it is in. We can no longer consume 25 percent of the world’s resources when we make up 5 percent of the world’s population. We can no longer push other countries around and do whatever we want to wherever we want to. This decline is inevitable. It happens to all empires. It occurs because other countries are becoming more powerful economically and militarily. Think China, India, Brazil, Indonesia.
Neither can the Federal government wield much influence over the economy. It can’t do very much to create jobs or keep jobs from going to other countries. The economy is a function of hundreds of thousands decisions being made by hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs and businessmen. Those decision are based on global market conditions over which the Federal government has little control. Yes, it can have some influence through fiscal policy, monetary policy and tax policy, but not that much.
Yet, there are things the Federal government can do to address the following problems. About 14 percent of our population and 19 percent of our children are living in poverty. We have the highest inequalities of wealth and income in the developed world. Most of our young people incur staggering debt in the process of getting educated.
What can the Federal government do now?
First and foremost, it can do everything in its power to assure that every American who has the potential to work is working at a job which enables her or him to earn enough to live above the poverty level. This will be very expensive. It costs lots of money to provide people who didn’t get them when they were younger with the skills, knowledge and emotional maturity required to work at jobs which yield family-sustaining incomes. Where can we get that kind of money?
We can get it by beginning to dismantle the American empire and downsize our war machine. The government can begin closing military bases around the world. It can begin cutting the defense budget. It can start negotiating with the other countries of the Western “free” world to get them to start picking up their part of the burden of defending the “free world”. It can convert our military into a stealth force of seals, commandos, rangers, spies, informants and snipers, a force designed to fight terrorism, not to invade and occupy countries. It can stop paying for the production of weapons that the armed forces don’t want but which continue to be produced because they provide jobs in Congresspersons’ districts. We spend 700 Billion dollars a year on our war machine. That is more than 45 percent of the discretionary funds spent by the Congress and almost half as much as the rest of the world combined. None of our leaders made a decision to do this. This happened very incrementally, slowly. We had to defend ourselves against the Soviet Union and the rest of the “free world” let us take on the responsibility of defending them as well as ourselves. We did this even though the last of our Presidents who was a military man warned us against it. The fact that we spend almost half of the discretionary Federal funds on weapons and armies is tremendously harmful to us. With one-third of that money we could provide people who are not working or who are working at poverty-level wages with the skills, knowledge and emotional maturity they need to work at jobs which pay family-sustaining wages and we could provide every student who is attending a public university with a tuition-free education.
Al Galves is a psychologist who practices in Las Cruces. He has a B.A. in Government from Cornell University and a Master of Government Administration degree from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a former Executive Director of the Southern Rio Grande Council of Governments.