America’s Great New Challenge

Duane and I worked on this piece together. Duane submitted it to a Montana Newspaper.

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The rampaging COVID-19 pandemic is America’s greatest challenge since WWII. As then, the defining challenge of our time is: Will the federal government provide the leadership, commitment, and funding to conquer the pandemic and provide for the future health and prosperity of all?

Some worry about spending money the government does not have thus increasing the national debt. Others claim the federal government must provide the funding needed to address the pandemic, climate change, and infrastructure crises as we met the demands of WWII.

The recent New York Times best seller, “The Deficit Myth” by Stephanie Kelton supports massive federal deficit spending. Indeed, modern monetary theory, as explained by Kelton, was at play when President Roosevelt responded with unprecedented federal spending first to the Great Depression in the 1930’s and WWII a decade later. 

 

 Striking similarities define the two periods separated by almost a century. First a depression threatening the lives and livelihoods of Americans followed by a massive federal jobs effort to build out infrastructure and fight a war. 

Why is our government so hesitant to step up to the funding required to finish our fight against the COVID-19 pandemic?

By the 1970's Milton Friedman and the Chicago school of economics raised the fear of inflation that ushered in President Reagan’s "Trickle Down" theory. Reagan claimed private enterprise was more efficient than the government. Therefore government should just stop spending on public infrastructure programs, get out of the way, and cut taxes on the wealthy. The private sector would provide the money to do the investing to create jobs. The wealthy would do a better job of investing than the government.

Forty years of Reagan’s federal austerity policy practices has led directly to wealth inequality that is larger than the Gilded Age of the 1920s leading to the Great Depression. 

We won WWII, built a great national highway system, and sent a man to the moon. America was the envy of the world. We sat at the top of the world’s technological and manufacturing powers.
We must remember how to fight a war and win it.  

Professor Stephanie Kelton reminds us how our once great America did it. We can do it again, if voters elect representatives who will accept the challenge to again do big things. 

Only our lack of resources and political will limit us. The US government does not lack money.  The federal government can legislate all the money it needs to mobilize the nation’s resources to meet its objectives.

The national debt is nothing more than an accounting record of private sector surplus.  It is not a debt to be paid off by our progeny. The US government is the source of all US dollars in circulation. US dollars spent by the federal government is public money, not tax payer money.

America must live up to its means, not within its means like a household.

It is up to the citizens to become educated, learn about candidates’ values and agendas, and make sure that they register and cast their ballots. True patriots vote and this is the most important election of our time.