Hating America, Nihal-Style

Try booking a window seat during your next daytime cross-country flight. Although astute frequent fliers angle for aisle seats, sitting next to the window never gets old to me. From New York, the terrain eases from greenery into farmland. A quick burst of mountains, some desert terrain, and you’re landing in the Californian airport of your choice.

What’s more striking than the evolution of the landscape or the sheer amount of space is how thoroughly, how completely, Americans have colonized the land below. If it’s arable, we’re growing, living or working on it. Even the forbidding desert houses such improbable cities as Phoenix and Las Vegas. You won’t find a better five hour display of the unparalleled bounty of resources we’ve been enjoying for the past 400 years. But this bounty has bred a flaw in the American psyche: blessed with plenty, we’ve never learned to make do within limits.

Make no mistake, this is fundamentally a good thing. America’s pursuit of better, faster, and stronger has given the world airplanes, the Internet, and Post-It Notes. All things considered, I’d rather be surrounded by people that usually ask “why not?” as a rhetorical question. But our instinct to push the envelope often makes prudence an afterthought. Examples abound: a war, funded to the last dime with borrowed money. Uncontrolled growth from Atlanta to the arid West, without a thought to husbanding the necessary water for newcomers. The average American saved just 0.5% of their income last year, which compares shamefully to the 8.9% recorded in 1978.

Well, it looks like our resources aren’t as unlimited as we thought. Texas barely has the funds to pay for the upkeep of its road network, let alone pay for new ones needed for a population that has grown 60% over the past 25 years. Healthcare premiums are the silent tax largely to blame for wage stagnation over the last two decades, but we still stubbornly insist that the profit motive of insurance and pharmaceutical companies is the most efficient way to deliver healthcare. Why don’t we have the money to keep our bridges from falling down or inspect Chinese toy imports, but our Defense Secretary can ask Congress for $170,000,000,000 to fund the war in 2009 with a straight face?

Don’t look to our elected officials for leadership on this front. When the costs of government rise faster than the tax base, lawmakers’ first instinct is to raise taxes, rather than question the effectiveness or efficiency of the bureaucracy. I saw this mentality on brilliant display at one of New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine’s town halls, where he’s proposing to cut the state’s $32 billion debt in half by raising road tolls 800% over the next 14 years. Not one slide of the Governor’s PowerPoint presentation identified tangible cuts in government spending—that is, to do with less.

But a successful democracy’s lawmakers are a reflection of its citizenry. Exhibit A: our man-child of a President who wins two elections, and then advises Americans how they can do their part to fight the ‘war on terror’: “I encourage you all to go shopping more,” he smirks to a compliant press corps. So it’s not surprising how Mitt Romney speaks to an America that insists on driving SUVs and borrowing sub-prime dollars to build McMansions, but then frets about a trillion-dollar war in the Middle East and plummeting housing prices.

To simply chuckle at Romney’s ability to squeeze “God,” “Family,” and “Reagan” into a thirty second response is to misunderestimate the political system in which he operates, and the free-candy mentality of America that allows it to thrive. Human history is littered with examples of dominant nations that spent like drunken sailors, and what happens next. Turns out that the sun did eventually set on the British Empire. And the French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, German, Soviet, Roman, Ottoman, Mogul, Mongol and Japanese, for that matter. Patting our collective backs feels good, but it does nothing to ensure that the American standard of living remains the envy of the world for the next 100 years.

Everyone has an opinion about gay marriage, abortion, and Al Sharpton. But I suggest that we change the subject, and begin a serious discussion about how to update the 1950s-era radar that guided my cross-country flight. Or making sure that the food we eat is safe. We have so much. We should be doing more with it.