Five ways we can make America work again
Over 55 years ago, President John F. Kennedy set the bar high for America in the race to land a man on the moon when he said, “We choose to go to the moon and do other things not because they are easy but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because the challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”
If ever there was a time to aim high again, it’s now. Setting big goals and sticking to them requires vision, discipline, hard work, staying power, and patience. In the current climate characterized by pandering politicians, instant-gratification-based consumerism, conflict-obsessed media and disrespect of approximately half the nation’s voting population for the views of the other half, it’s hard to imagine how we can lift ourselves out of our glasshalf-empty view of America and unite around a vision for greatness.
Everyone can agree we want America to work better. That desire was, in part, the message sent by the disaffected to the comfortable in the 2016 presidential election.
From the American Revolution to the present, the idea of America has been grounded in continuous, if imperfect, reforms. To make America more economically competitive and more socially enlightened and to leverage the talents and hopes of our diverse base of citizens, here are five areas we can address in 2018 and beyond. All will require an attitude adjustment, a willingness of those affected to compromise, and a commitment to greater accountability.
We must do more to live within our means, personally and as a nation. While deficit spending has its place in an economy, we must have the discipline to pay down our personal and national debt even as we address pressing issues. That means postponing purchases of unnecessary personal items, decreasing government spending and reinvesting savings in programs that can help all Americans, such as job training. Some states require a balanced annual budget; why shouldn’t the federal government, too?
Get more value from our institutions. That means removing practices and policies that have too often protected the entrenched and not rewarded individual initiative sufficiently. Examples include the tenure system in secondary schools and higher education, seniority-based systems in hiring and firing, and immigration policies that have restricted the ability of talented immigrants to live in America.
Establish standards at the national and state level for measuring the value of regulations. The best regulations should empower the greatest number of people and create the greatest economic benefit, not favor those who contributed the most money to create or dismantle them. Also, regulators should be chosen based on their knowledge of the industries they are regulating, not on their political connections.
Level the playing field in elections, which would not only make campaigns more competitive but also might encourage more people to run for office. A broad decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to effectively undo gerrymandering of electoral districts would be a truly transformational development. So would structural reform of campaign financing. Imagine campaigns that relied only on public funding and/or crowdfunding, not SuperPACs and wealthy partisan donors.
Finally, and perhaps hardest of all to effect, is resisting the negative thinking that surrounds us. Demonization and fear-mongering driven by politicians and cultof-personality media commentators may do more to undermine hope and unity than anything else. As consumers of media and as voters, we can insist that those ambassadors of the divisiveness change their attitudes by changing channels on which they appear and by voting those out of office who pander to our basest instincts to get re-elected. We get the government and media we deserve; we have it in our power to choose thought leaders who are noble, not venal.
America is at a transformational point in its history. The country could slip into a disunited, negative, tribalistic state or we could refresh our institutions, better channel our national energies and redefine what has been a role model for the rest of the world. That effort will be hard work, but it is worth it.