Voters still up for grabs
30 years, rising healthcare costs and the retirement of the baby boomers are projected to cause deficits that make the current one look puny. At the rate we’re going, the United States would almost surely default on its debt one day . . . We already have a blueprint for a bipartisan solution. The BowlesSimpson commission hashed out a sensible plan of spending cuts, entitlement program reforms and revenue increases that would shave $4 trillion off the deficit over the next decade. It shares the pain of needed deficit reduction, while protecting the most vulnerable and maintaining investments in our future productivity.
“But we can’t focus on the deficit alone,” added Romer. “Persistent unemployment is destroying the lives and wasting the talents of more than 13 million Americans. Pairing strong stimulus with a plan to reduce the deficit would likely pack a particularly powerful punch for confidence and spending.”
Second, I want to vote for a candidate who is committed to reforming taxes, and cutting spending, in a fair way. The rich must pay more, but everyone has to pay something. We are all in this together.
Third, I want to vote for a candidate who has an inspirational vision, not just a plan to balance the budget. People will sacrifice to make this country great again if they think you have a real plan for U.S. success in the 21st century. And that plan is obvious. We’re not going to be about launching one big moon shot anymore. We need to be building a country where everyone in the world wants to come to launch their own moon shot because we have the best immigration policies, regulations, schools and incentives. We can’t tax or cut our way to prosperity and jobs. We have to invent our way there. We need both more “Made in Ameri- ca” and “Imagined in America.” Finally, I want to vote for a candidate who supports a minimum floor of public financing of presidential, Senate and House campaigns. Money in politics is out of control today. Our Congress has become a forum for legalized bribery. U.S. citizens are losing faith in the instruments of government because they think the game is rigged by big money — and they’re right.
Any candidate with that fourpart agenda would win — and so would the country, because he would win with a mandate to do what needs doing.
“The people are so far ahead of the politicians,” says the Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg. His polling, he adds, shows that many U.S. citizens today “think that China, Germany and Brazil have strategies for success, and that we don’t. They are looking for a leader who will be really bold.”
People have been misled by months of crazy GOP debates that make the country look so much more divided, small-minded and unwilling to sacrifice to fix our problems than it actually is. That’s why I’d bet anything that the first candidate who steps out of the cartoonish politics of destruction — “Romney is just a capitalist vulture. Obama is a Kenyan socialist” — and shocks the public by going radically responsible, radically honest, radically demanding and radically aspirational, along the lines above, will be our next president.
I hope it is Obama, because I agree with him on so many other issues. But if it’s Romney, he’d deserve to win. And, if by some miracle, both run that campaign, and the 2012 contest is about two such competing visions, then put every dollar you own in the U.S. stock market. It will go up a gazillion points.