What we should have been talking about 30 years ago…

…Before I was born. I really like David Leonhardt and the perspective he has provided in his economics reporting at the New York Times. Today, he has an article about why the U.S. isn’t much different from Greece, in which he says:

[P]oliticians, spendthrift as some may be, are not the main source of the problem.

We, the people, are.

We have not figured out the kind of government we want. We’re in favor of Medicare,Social Security, good schools, wide highways, a strong military — and low taxes. Dealing with this disconnect will be the central economic issue of the next decade, in Europe, Japan and this country.

How right Mr. Leonhardt is. Americans expect everything to run smoothly, without delays or breakdowns, and yet we don’t want to pay for anything. People complain all the time that we’re paying too much even to ride the subway and wondering in what way money is being mis-spent by the government. Lost in this is the scary possibility that maybe we’re getting what we pay for. (We spend way too much on defense — but that’s another story).

What I wish is that politicians and regular Americans alike had been saying what Leonhardt is getting at here about twenty or thirty years ago, when the anti-tax movement was crowing away. It is that movement, after all, that has called on citizens to be skeptical of all taxes, rather than to put into perspective what we get from paying them. It is also this movement that would have us believe that all taxes are created equal and are bad, though they usually focus their energy on eliminating taxes that affect the very well-off.

But it is not usually human nature to anticipate and prepare for disaster, especially in an environment that encourages short term profit. (Such allegations have recently been foisted on BP). So it is encouraging at the same time it is unfortunate that we are just now looking at this discrepancy between what we expect of government services and what we are willing to pay. I can only believe we’re looking at it now (and not yet doing much about it) because it is forced on us by increasingly dire circumstances. So it goes…