by Tony E. Hansen

What is so troubling about most of the rancor surrounding recent proposals around Washington is that for at least 8 years (perhaps since the late 1970s) we have waited in vain for real policies to move our economy into the future.  We watched as people pillaged the US Treasury to fund huge banks (as well as S&Ls), wars, and conglomerate corporation expansions, in addition to building up the bank accounts of the upper echelon.  We did all of this while doing nothing to protect taxpayers, nothing to protect the middle class investments, nothing to build sustainable energy, nothing to protect the environment, nothing to change health care costs, nothing to secure a better interdependent global future for everyone and nothing to improve our schools or society. 

We made ourselves vulnerable to extremists and terrorism. We kept borrowing to consume more, without any sense of the consequences.

We have made abstract fears, polarization of society and denial of equality as priorities of public policy rather than to focus upon the public well-being, the loss of living standards, or to address why prices are rising and quality lowers. 

We congratulate ourselves for obtaining “low” price on a tag without realizing we paid through taxes for the building and the parking lot, before we even walked into the store.  We congratulate ourselves for a low price despite having a continuous cost to replace the item. We congratulate the low price despite neighbors losing their jobs, as companies move operations across the border, or communities turning entire main streets into ghost towns as big box retail move that business elsewhere.

Today, we are witnessing what happens when one keeps kicking the can down the street because we have ignored the issues for decades.  We can no longer wait on these issues. We can not take them one at a time because each affects the other and we have let all of them get wildly out of control and too big to ignore (or to fail). Sooner or later, you have to take care of the problem rather than continue to ignore them and all of these contribute to the massive over-spending that we have encouraged for the past few decades.

Further, we cannot be so blind to believe that what appeared to work in the past will work in 2010 or 2050.   The world is constantly changing; we have to be ready and be competitive.  We need to be forward thinking rather than ego boasting and work with cooperative proposals to lead our country into the new technology age.

If we do nothing constructive towards those ends or let the inconsequential differences define us, we sacrifice valuable time and resources as well as our future generations. Above all, we must break these gluttonous selfish instincts that plague and fragment our society, and instead, we must rebuild our social framework in order to build our future.  We cannot let petty differences keep us from our common potential and common good.  Only then, can we heal the wounds created by the recent divisions and only then, can we move forward to save our great country.