Still Digging - NYTimes.com

Still Digging - NYTimes.com

Still Digging

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

¶Given where we are, this tax-cut deal with the Republicans is the best President Obama could do since raising taxes in a recession would not have been a good idea and the Republicans had the votes to prevent it. But given where we need to go, this deal is just another shot of morphine to a country that needs to do things that are big and hard and still only wants to do things that are easy and small. It still feels to me as though we’re splitting the difference between the two parties, not making a difference for the country as a whole.

¶More than ever, America today reminds me of a working couple where the husband has just lost his job, they have two kids in junior high school, a mortgage and they’re maxed out on their credit cards. On top of it all, they recently agreed to take in their troubled cousin, Kabul, who just can’t get his act together and keeps bouncing from relative to relative. Meanwhile, their Indian nanny, who traded room and board for baby-sitting, just got accepted to M.I.T. on a full scholarship and will be leaving them in a few months. What to do?

¶One strategy would be to hunker down, don’t spend a dime on anything other than food, the mortgage and paying off their credit card debts. They would get by, but there’s not much future in it. Another strategy would be to borrow against their life insurance policies to make up for the loss of income, keep living like they’re living, and hope that the husband’s job comes back before his unemployment checks run out.

¶A third strategy — the right one — would be to tell themselves: “You know, we’re in a totally new situation. Dad’s job isn’t coming back. If we want a better future, we need a plan to cut, save and invest all at the same time, and as wisely as we possibly can, because we’ve got no more cushion. Instead of Disney World this year, we’ll go camping in the state park and use those savings so that dad can go back and get a master’s degree. After all, unemployment among the college-educated is only around 5 percent. We’re also going to give up buying any new gadgets, cellphone apps or video games and use those savings to pay for extra tutoring in physics and violin for our boys. And, finally, we’re going to tell cousin Kabul that he needs to get a job, move into his own place and stand on his own two feet.”

¶Like our mythical family, we need a plan, not just more sugar treats. Surely the cynical quote of the week — courtesy of The Daily Beast — goes to Dan Bartlett, the former George W. Bush administration spokesman who was speaking about the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans that Bush “temporarily” put in place a decade ago: “We knew that, politically, once you get it into law, it becomes almost impossible to remove it. That’s not a bad legacy. The fact that we were able to lay the trap does feel pretty good, to tell you the truth.”

¶Bartlett offered no thoughts as to how these budget-busting tax cuts will address our country’s deficiencies today — just a high-five that in the politics of sports, the G.O.P. just scored a goal on Obama.

¶We don’t seem to realize: We’re in a hole and still digging. Our educational attainment levels are stagnating; our infrastructure is fraying. We don’t have enough smart incentives to foster both innovation and manufacturing; we’re not importing enough talent in an age when we have to compete for jobs with low-wage but high-skilled Indians and Chinese — and we’re still piling up debt. Responding to all this will require a whole new hybrid politics for where to cut, where to save, where to invest, where to tax and where to untax. Shaping that new politics is a revolutionary role I still hope President Obama will play.

¶E.J. Dionne, in his Washington Post column, quoted Representative Tom Perriello, a Democrat of Virginia, as saying that voters are less interested in “bipartisanship” than “postpartisanship.” He explained: “What they’re looking for is someone who solves the problem, not for a solution that happens to be halfway between the two parties.”

¶Read Tuesday’s article in this paper about how international education experts were stunned by the fact that students in Shanghai outscored their counterparts in dozens of other countries, in reading as well as in math and science, according to the results of the widely respected Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, tests, which measure learning by 15-year-old students in 65 countries. Yes, Shanghai represents the best of China, but the best of China is now scoring better than anywhere else in the world. America’s 15-year-olds ranked 14th in reading skills, 17th in science and 25th in math, below the average.

¶Economics is not war. It can be win-win, so it’s good for the world if China is doing better. But it can’t be good for America if every time we come to a hard choice we borrow more money from a country that is not just out-saving and out-hustling us, but is also starting to out-educate us. We need a plan.