You might have to force yourself to work all the way through “America 101,” [1] a recent article by Bill Moyers. Those who care about America’s future will make it all the way through, despite the bad news.
The article is yet another well-researched and well-expressed piece of writing by Moyers, who cautions that it is “the mark of a truly educated person is to be deeply moved by statistics.” The many danger flags found in this article are, indeed, found in the form of distressing statistics.
Connect the dots: Neglected schools, crumbling roads, permanent environmental “dead zones,” inadequate emergency systems, understaffed hospitals, library cutbacks, the lack of affordable housing, incompetent government agencies, whether it is FEMA or state bureaucracies charged with protecting helpless children – these are characteristic features of our public sector today.
What is the biggest danger to our country? That we are recklessly going broke with no backup plan. “America’s ship of state is floating in a sea of red ink.” How broke?
In an important but largely neglected report in 2002, Kent Smetters and Jagadeesh Gokhale found that our fiscal gap – the difference (in present value) between the government’s future receipts and expenditures – assuming the same net tax rates going forward, was a staggering $45 trillion dollars. This is $4 trillion more than the entire capital stock of industry ($25.9 trillion) and total market capitalization ($14.3 trillion) in 2003.
This report was commissioned by the federal government, then suppressed (see the article for details).
Without an healthy economy, it will be impossible to keep doing much of the things we take for granted. Infrastructure, health care, education, keeping ourselves safe from criminals–especially the white collar criminals who are running our economy into the ground.
We cannot any longer afford to be complacent. We need to take the message to the schools, to encourage the students to speak up for their own futures:
So I have a practical suggestion for those of you who are principals, superintendents, school board members, and teachers: Go home from here and revise your core curriculum. Yes, teach the three Rs; teach the ABCs; make sure your kids learn algebra, biology, and calculus. But teach them about the American Revolution – that it isn’t just about white men in powdered wigs carrying muskets in a time long gone. It’s about slaves who rose up and women who wouldn’t be denied and unwelcome immigrants and exploited workers who against great odds claimed the revolution as their own and breathed life into it.
Teach your kids they don’t have to accept what they have been handed. Teach them they are not only equal citizens under the law, but equal sons and daughters – heirs, everyone – of that revolution, and that it is their right to claim it as their own. Teach them to shake the torpor that has been prescribed for them by calculating elders and ideologues. Teach them there is only one force strong enough to counter the power of organized money today, and that is the power of organized people. They are waiting for this message; the kids in your schools have been made to feel as victims, powerless, ashamed, inferior, and disenfranchised. Tell them it’s a great big lie – despite their poverty, circumstance, and the long odds they’ve been handed, they have the power to make the world over again, in their image . . .
Put that in your core curriculum. It’s America 101.
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