America gets the government it wants to pay for

 

Today's post will be short and sweet.  Around 10:45 am, I called Social Security to see about having Federal Taxes withheld from my monthly payments.  One problem - they do not have enough staff available to man their phone lines.  As a result, people can be kept on hold for over an hour.

Normally, I would find waiting 60+ minutes to reach a human inexcusable.  At least, SSA has a system where they will call a person back on the same number from which they made the original call.  Yet, I find this a little off-putting, and quite understandable given how many Americans think of the role of government and its funding.  

Americans like to think that we can get good things by paying prices for items that "fall off the back of the truck."  This helps to explain why government does so many things and does them in a half-assed way. It is much easier to say that we fund a wide range of services than to say that we fund none of them particularly well.  For example, let's talk about Social Security.  We charge employers and employees 7.5% of each employee's salary to fund future retirement benefits.  Yet, by 2040, the Social Security Trust Fund will run out of money, and benefits will need to be cut by 20%.  Instead of explaining to the public that longer lives require that we put more into the trust fund to pay for longer retirements, we keep passing the buck into the future as if we will get something for nothing.  So, we will likely find ourselves getting benefit cuts when we need them most.

At the end of WW2, the United States found itself as the dominant super power.  We invested in global military superiority for the sake of our prosperity - by fostering peaceful trade with our currency being the world's exchange standard, we could buy things cheaper than if another country's currency was the exchange standard of choice.  Yes, we made the mistake of exporting production to countries where labor was cheaper than in the US.  But we were able to maintain a standard of living as long as the domestic job market kept growing.  Unfortunately, it did - but in ways that didn't benefit the American worker.  Part time jobs without benefits became the norm, and both our government and its citizens started living on credit.

Sooner or later, we will have to pay the bill for borrowing more than we can afford.  Hopefully, our children and grandchildren will be able to do so.