ECONOMY - It's Nobody's Fault; it's Everybody's Fault

"Shields, Brooks on U.S. Facing Tough Calls on Libya, Pension Woes"
PBS Newshour 3/4/2011

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Excerpt from transcript

JIM LEHRER (Editor Newshour): And do you agree with what the mayor of that small town said; it's nobody's fault; it's everybody's fault; it's a lot of causes here?

MARK SHIELDS, syndicated columnist: Yes, Geoff Garin, the Democratic pollster, has a great statement. And I think it's quite accurate. He said, Americans are not willing to pay for the government they want. They want more government than they're willing to pay for. And I think that's been the case. I don't think there is any question about it.

JIM LEHRER: Do agree with that? That's what...

DAVID BROOKS, New York Times columnist: Yes.

I mean, we had a surge, not only of private debt, but also public debt. And it is a question of living within your means. And, somehow -- it is an odd phenomenon, because every generation has an incentive to spend on themselves and put off cost to the future.

And yet, in American history, nobody has quite done it the way we have. And so you wonder, why is that? And you go back. I was reading FDR's comments even during the New Deal, when they were spending a lot of money and they had to.

But there was sort of a moral horror of debt, because they had lived sort of risky lives, and they were sort of risk-averse, maybe more than us, and I think because they felt a bridge generation to generation. And they didn't even have to think of it. They had an instinctual disgust of pushing that off.

And somehow that got eroded. And so we had this surge in private debt, but we also had a surge in promises, where politicians said: I can't afford to pay you now, but I'm going to give you all these benefits you will enjoy some day without the money actually being there to pay for them.

JIM LEHRER: And then came a recession.

MARK SHIELDS: That's right.

One American political leader, to his credit, raised this and made a campaign on it. And it was Ross Perot. I mean, he had a lot defects and shortcomings as a candidate, but he confronted it in 1992, after we had quadrupled the national debt.

We had gone 200 years in the country, through the Louisiana Purchase, two great wars, Great Depression, run up a total of indebtedness of $1 trillion by 1980, 200 years. We quadrupled it in 12 years, with no wars and no depression, by tax cuts and spending and all the rest of it.

And Perot came along and said, what you have done, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. You have given yourselves a party and passed the tab on to your kids. And he put it on the national agenda, to his credit. And we did -- we did confront it in -- at that point in the late 1990s. Both parties tried to take some credit for it, and probably deserve it.

Bill Clinton was the president. He gets most of the lion's share. But, I mean, it has -- it has become an epidemic in the country.

Ross Perot was correct. We as a nation, as individuals, Republicans, Democrats, liberal, or conservative SHOULD be ashamed of our economy. Built on buy, buy, buy. Over consumption even if you cannot afford it.