Nigeria Content Online

The
lights are going out all over America – literally. Colorado Springs has
made headlines with its desperate attempt to save money by turning off
a third of its streetlights, but similar things are either happening or
being contemplated across the nation, from Philadelphia to Fresno.

Meanwhile, a country that once amazed the world
with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal
to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving
itself: In a number of states, local governments are breaking up roads
they can no longer afford to maintain, and returning them to gravel.

And a nation that once prized education – that was
among the first to provide basic schooling to all its children – is now
cutting back. Teachers are being laid off; programmes are being
canceled; in Hawaii, the school year itself is being drastically
shortened. And all signs point to even more cuts ahead.

We’re told that we have no choice, that basic
government functions – essential services that have been provided for
generations – are no longer affordable. And it’s true that state and
local governments, hit hard by the recession, are cash-strapped. But
they wouldn’t be quite as cash-strapped if their politicians were
willing to consider at least some tax increases.

And the federal government, which can sell
inflation-protected long-term bonds at an interest rate of only 1.04
percent, isn’t cash-strapped at all. It could and should be offering
aid to local governments, to protect the future of our infrastructure
and our children.

But Washington is providing only a trickle of
help, and even that grudgingly. We must place priority on reducing the
deficit, say Republicans and “centrist” Democrats. And then, virtually
in the next breath, they declare that we must preserve tax cuts for the
very affluent, at a budget cost of $700 billion over the next decade.

In effect, a large part of our political class is
showing its priorities: Given the choice between asking the richest 2
percent or so of Americans to go back to paying the tax rates they paid
during the Clinton-era boom, or allowing the nation’s foundations to
crumble – literally in the case of roads, figuratively in the case of
education – they’re choosing the latter.

It’s a disastrous choice in both the short run and the long run.

In the short run, those state and local cutbacks are a major drag on the economy, perpetuating devastatingly high unemployment.

It’s crucial to keep state and local government in
mind when you hear people ranting about runaway government spending
under President Barack Obama. Yes, the federal government is spending
more,

although not as much as you might think. But state
and local governments are cutting back. And if you add them together,
it turns out that the only big spending increases have been in
safety-net programmes like unemployment insurance, which have soared in
cost thanks to the severity of the slump.

That is, for all the talk of a failed stimulus, if
you look at government spending as a whole you see hardly any stimulus
at all. And with federal spending now trailing off, while big state and
local cutbacks continue, we’re going into reverse.

But isn’t keeping taxes for the affluent low also
a form of stimulus? Not so you’d notice. When we save a schoolteacher’s
job, that unambiguously aids employment; when we give millionaires more
money instead, there’s a good chance that most of that money will just
sit idle.

And what about the economy’s future?

Everything we know about economic growth says that
a well-educated population and high-quality infrastructure are crucial.
Emerging nations are making huge efforts to upgrade their roads, their
ports and their schools. Yet in America we’re going backward.

How did we get to this point? It’s the logical
consequence of three decades of anti-government rhetoric, rhetoric that
has convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a
dollar wasted, that the public sector can’t do anything right.

The anti-government campaign has always been
phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud – to checks sent to
welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats
uselessly pushing paper around. But those were myths, of course; there
was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed. And
now that the campaign has reached fruition, we’re seeing what was
actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very
rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like
lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as
a whole.

So the end result of the long campaign against
government is that we’ve taken a disastrously wrong turn. America is
now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere.

© 2010 New York Times News Service