Poor U.S. of A., forever in decline. the arrival of public theaters in Boston circa 1790 caused Samuel Adams to despair for the cause of liberty in the face of such debauchery. “Alas!” he wrote. “Will men never be free!” Charles Lindbergh fretted, “It seems improbable that we could win a war in Europe.” Long before baseball, hand-wringing was the national pastime. We’ve never been virtuous enough, civilized enough, smart enough or resolute enough.
I was born into a country reeling from Sputnik, which revealed to the whole world that Americans are as dumb as rocks. John F. Kennedy had just been elected President, in part by bemoaning the “missile gap” between the mighty Soviet arsenal and our paltry few bottle rockets. “The United States no longer carries the same image of a vital society on the move with its brightest days ahead,” Kennedy said in his final debate with Richard M. Nixon. That’s the same Nixon who declared eight years later, “We are worse off in every area of the world tonight than we were when President Eisenhower left office.” Hard to believe we could sink further, but we did, as the nightmare of Vietnam segued into the nightmare of Watergate, while the Japanese exposed the insufficiency of American enterprise. As I stumbled off to college, President Jimmy Carter was warning us about “a crisis of confidence … that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.” Thanks to our horrible schools, we were — according to the title of a major 1983 report — “A Nation at Risk.” Then our family values went down the toilet.
You’d think America would be as washed up by now as the Captain and Tennille. So how come we’re so much stronger than we were 50 years ago? Somehow, in the 235 years since we got started, Americans have weathered Boston theaters and Soviet science prodigies, violent lyrics and sex out of wedlock. We’ve survived a Civil War, two world wars and a Great Depression, not to mention immigrant hordes, alcohol, Freemasons and the “vast wasteland” of network television. We’ve dodged the population bomb, the coming ice age, acid rain and the domino effect. America is to nations what Roberto Clemente was to right fielders. The Pirates legend fretted endlessly about how poorly he felt and how sick he was — while vigorously spraying hits and vacuuming fly balls.
So don’t reach for the defibrillator paddles or the rosary beads quite yet.
Overblown Symptoms
These days, the doctors diagnosing American decline tend to focus on two types of disease. Some worry about deteriorating “social capital” — inadequate education, a demoralized workforce, dysfunctional politics. Others focus on the physical fitness of our economic edifice: the scale of investment, the level of debt, the fractures in the infrastructure. If you collect enough symptoms, you can make a strong-sounding case that the country is indeed quite sick. But fallen trees don’t prove the forest is dying.
And some of the most cited symptoms are overblown. Take the much discussed problem of income inequality. A very small number of superwealthy people are pocketing nearly all the growth in our national income. That sounds dire for a nation founded on the ideal of equality. It isn’t, though, for a couple of reasons. First, a significant part of the rise in inequality is an illusion. Changes to the tax code since the 1980s have created strong incentives for owners of private businesses and certain partnerships to report their business earnings as personal income. This didn’t necessarily change the amount of money in their pockets; it just meant that money is recorded in a different column of Uncle Sam’s ledger. This expansion of so-called Subchapter S corporations and LLCs inflated the tax returns of the very rich — primarily the top 0.5% of all taxpayers. If the tax laws are changed again, money will shift again. Count on that.
Read “How to Restore the American Dream.”
See pictures of hard times in Las Vegas.
