Government is not the Problem

I sent this commentary piece off to the Star Tribune this morning:

Two articles in Monday's Star Tribune, one on the front page about our country losing its competitive edge in telecommunications and the other on the front page of the Local Section about the high cost of building roads in the state of Minnesota, have a common theme. They both demonstrate the moral bankruptcy of today's Republican Party.

Since Ronald Reagan, the mantra of the Republican Party has been: government is the problem. We need to get government out of the way; we need to starve the beast; we need to give the people their money back since they know what to do with it better than the government! Well, it's hard to argue with this as a political strategy; it worked. We have Republicans in charge of the government at both the state and national levels.

But as a governing strategy for the well-being of the country this mantra has been an absolute failure. The reason is simple. In a competitive and dangerous world, there are some things, like defense, that only the government can do. And there some other things -- like creating a world-class competitive infrastructure, and guaranteeing a highly educated workforce, and delivering an efficient and fair health care system -- that can only be done well with government involvement and investment.

This is the unifying message of the two articles. Why are we falling behind other countries in the world in the delivery speed of our communications? Shouldn't our commitment to free-enterprise solutions leave other countries' state-run communications systems in the dust? The reality is that our hodge-podge of free-market solutions is putting us at a competitive disadvantage with countries that have made a huge government investment in telecommunications technology. And why is our Governor's Transportation Secretary moaning about not getting enough federal dollars for road construction and proposing to borrow money to build roads? How ironic. Why not let the free market take care of it.

The truth of the matter is that the Republican Party's mantra that the government is the problem is a lie - and they know it. How else does one explain the explosive and historic growth in the size of our federal government at the hands of a Republican President and Congress? And why else is our Republican Governor proposing to borrow massive amounts of money to fund road construction. They both know that in order to remain competitive in the world economy that government has a vitally important, and large, role to play. And so they are spending government money at a breathtaking clip, while at the same time they are bad-mouthing the government.

But their schizophrenic behavior regarding what they say and what they do is leading us down a black hole of bad government practices and enormous debt. Our President can't stop talking about making tax cuts permanent while his Congressional compatriots are cutting back room deals that lard the budget with bridges to no-where. Some of these projects are probably worthwhile and necessary. But how would we know? Republicans can't bring themselves to talk openly about what we really need and what it is going to cost. And it is the same story with our Governor. He will never raise our taxes, although he doesn't seem to mind a fee increase here or there, or an increase in property taxes. And he is perfectly O.K. with borrowing hundreds of millions of dollars to build roads, and why not? He is not asking us to pay for it.

What we need from our Republican leaders is the truth, and perhaps they need to start by admitting it to themselves. We need our government. We need national defense, a world-class communications and transportation infrastructure, an efficient healthcare system, an educated workforce, and it is all very expensive. Who is going to pay for it? A leader with moral integrity would come to the American people and the state of Minnesota and say that this is what we need, this is what it is really going to cost, and this is the sacrifice and investment in our future that we are going to ask every citizen of our state and country to make now. We are not going to lay it in the laps of our children. Will we ever hear anything like that from our Republican leaders?