"The Second Debate - Where Was Reagan's Optimism and Humor?"

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“The Second Debate – Where was Reagan’s Optimism and Humor?”

October 5, 2023

 

“Debate: A discussion for elucidating truth.”

                                                                                                An American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828

                                                                                                Noah Webster, LL.D. (1758-1843)

 

Like most Republicans, I watched Wednesday’s debate hoping for a Reagan-like figure to emerge. The venue was the library of a President who had vision, radiated confidence, optimism, humor, and compassion. Like many, I was disappointed. Haley exhibited confidence and vision but without compassion that endears politicians to voters. DeSantis had the confidence of a governor who has done well but appeared humorless. Scott exuded optimism and compassion, but without vision.  

 

Like today, in 1980 Americans did not believe in themselves. We were in a funk. A President had been assassinated seventeen years earlier; a second resigned ten years later. The Vietnam War, which bled and divided the country for ten years, ignobly ended in 1975; inflation was rampant, with high interest rates and falling real incomes. Culturally, the country was a mess. The optimism of the post-War years was gone. Early in his presidency, Reagan remarked: “What I’d really like to do is go down as the President who made Americans believe in themselves again.” That he did, and the Country, through three presidents, experienced almost twenty years of economic growth and prosperity.

 

We are living through another fallow period. The twenty-year War against Islamic Terrorism ended disastrously in Afghanistan two years ago. China is on the rise. Inflation is destroying incomes. Parents are excluded from decisions regarding their school-age children. Borders are non-existent. We are told we are a racist society, that our country was built on the backs of slaves. We are divided into oppressors and victims; and that it is okay, if one is a victim, to rampage through streets and destroy private property. Conservative speakers are not allowed on campuses. Public figures cannot define a woman, yet transwomen are allowed to compete against biological women in sports. In his farewell address to the nation, on January 11, 1989, President Reagan said, “All great change in America begins at the dinner table.” Now, the nuclear family is considered passé by many. 

 

But instead of Reagan, the elephant in the room last Wednesday was Donald Trump. In 2016, Trump recognized that elitists had captured both parties, and that large swaths of the electorate felt ignored, especially working-and-middle class Americans. Ignoring a warning from Senator Schumer, he promised to drain Washington’s swamp, where politicians and bureaucrats live and thrive. As President, he was harassed by untrue allegations and unfair investigations, which impacted his administration. He accomplished a lot, but, thin-skinned and humorless, his misbehavior after his loss in 2020 gave strength to the opposition. The country, divided by the War in Iraq, the response to the credit crisis, and by Barack Obama (a man many hoped would unite us), has been riven further apart by the antics of Mr. Trump.

 

Today, driven by a desire for personal resurrection, Trump is but a sliver of what he had been eight years ago. Yet, if he succeeds in winning the Republican nomination, as now seems possible, he will, in my opinion and barring third party entrants, lead the Party to catastrophic losses next November.

 

But back to what was termed a debate: In contrast to Webster’s definition, no truths were elucidated. Nevertheless, I preferred this to the first, as there was less in-fighting and more attacks on Biden and his policies. But like the first, what we witnessed was not a debate. Dozens of questions – some good but others snide and irrelevant – were asked, each of a particular individual who was given sixty seconds to respond. Rebuttals were allowed thirty seconds. Perfect for soundbites but not for learning. Candidates spoke over one another. The result was entertaining but hardly illuminating. And it ended with a childish, game-show-like question from Dana Perino: “Which one of you, tonight, should be voted off the island?” That question elicited the evening’s best response. Ron DeSantis: “I think that is disrespectful to my fellow contenders.”

 

In 1960, two years before her death, Eleanor Roosevelt published You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life. In it she wrote: “Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry his own weight, this is a frightening prospect.”  That is true, but for the person who cherishes freedom, the responsibility to carry one’s own weight is no burden; it is a welcome obligation and opportunity. Most people prefer a person with confidence, vision, and humor, someone who looks forward optimistically. We yearn for a leader who will give us free rein, to let us succeed based on merit. Perhaps in the next debate such a candidate will emerge?

 Last night’s debate, in my opinion, was an improvement on the first. There was less in-fighting, while Trump was denounced for not being there. This was especially true of Christie and DeSantis, with the former calling him Donald Duck. Despite recent polls showing Trump beating Biden, there was a sense that for Republicans to prevail next year they must return to conservative principles, which means a Party without Trump at the head of the ticket. For the most part, they targeted their real opponent, President Biden. The focus was on issues: the border, the economy, rule of law, crime, energy, education, family, China, and Ukraine. I thought they all did well. A Poignant moment came when Senator Scott spoke of how black families have survived slavery and discrimination. He credited the values on which the country was founded and family. He said the United States was not a racist country.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Migration”

September 28, 2023

 

“No nation in history has survived once its borders were destroyed, once its citizenship was rendered

no different from mere residence, and once its neighbors with impunity undermined its sovereignty.”

                                                                                                                          Victor Davis Hanson (1953-)

                                                                                                                          Classicist and military historian

                                                                                                                           Senior Fellow, Hoover Institute

                                                                                                                           American Greatness, Sep. 21, 2023

 

Over two and a half million illegal migrants have crossed our southern border this fiscal year. Last week, 10,000 crossed into Eagle Pass, Texas, a city of fewer than 30,000. The United States is not alone in being inundated by swarms of migrants. On Italy’s island of Lampedusa, where 6,000 locals reside, 11,000 migrants arrived in five days last week. In the UK’s The Spectator, on the same date, Douglas Murray wrote: “Keep allowing people with no discernible asylum claims to land by the thousands, from a continent with hundreds of millions more to come, and you will be fêted. Stop the law-breaking and you will find yourself prosecuted.” Today, the problem of illegal immigration appears insoluble. It seems to be, as Churchill once said about Russia: “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” It is neither a mystery nor insoluble. But it is a problem political leaders in Washington and Brussels refuse to address honestly.

 

On one side, there are those who despair a humanitarian crisis – people living in utter poverty and under dictatorial regimes. These people are willing to accommodate victims (perceived or real) without reserve. On the other side are those willing to exercise any measure to keep out all illegal immigrants – a wall, armed guards, barbed wire, refusals to let over-crowded boats dock. It is a problem in need of the common sense of a Jeeves, when too much of the West is led by well-intentioned, feeble-minded Bertie Woosters. 

 

Migration has been a factor in human evolution for at least 200,000 years – since homo sapiens began leaving Africa. For the first 180,000-190,000 years our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, migrating from one area to another, depending on weather and food availability. They first populated the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. Around 15,000 years ago they sailed to Australia, and crossed the Bering Sea to the Americas, Sometime about 12,000 to 13,000 years ago our ancestors began to transition from nomads to farmers, raising crops and animals for food, and around 3,000 BCE city states were created, to satisfy a need for laws to govern society and commerce.

 

Political and religious persecution, along with economic opportunity, are the principal reasons people leave homelands for other places. But demographics also plays a role. In some places, population growth outstrips food resources. The developed world has the opposite problem – shrinking populations, which can be offset with increased in-migration. In Europe, according to Christopher Caldwell writing in the September 21, 2023 issue of The Spectator, “each native generation is only about two-thirds the size of the last.” The Total Fertility Rate (TFR) in the European Union is 1.5, while that of sub-Saharan Africa is 4.6. (A TFR of 2.1 is needed to replace the population.) Based on current trends, sub-Saharan Africa’s population would expand ten-fold between 1950 and 2050. (In contrast, the United States’ population grew just over three fold from 1920 to 2020.) With these dynamics – a Europe that eschews child-bearing, an Africa birthing more children than can be accommodated, and a Middle East in turmoil – it is unsurprising that Europe faces a migration crisis. Nor is it surprising that the U.S., with a TFR of 1.6, has need of more immigrants. Political parties on the Continent and in the U.S. must set aside partisan differences and address a reality that cannot be wished away. 

 

Italy, with a TFR of 1.24, has one of the lowest birthrates in Europe. The Italian National Institute of Statistics estimates that the population of Italy by 2070 will have declined by 12 million to 47.7 million, while the median age will have increased from 47 to 54. Have government officials thought about the costs and ramifications of this self-induced crisis, of the ratio of workers to retirees? Is Italy willing to assimilate enough migrants to offset the decline in their native population? How will an influx of immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East affect a culture that reaches back more than two thousand years?

 

The United States processes roughly a million legal immigrants each year. Illegal crossings have been a problem for decades but have grown noticeably worse over the past three years. Illegal border crossings in 2020 were less than 500,000. This year, they will exceed 2.5 million, more than double legal immigration. The border with Mexico extends two thousand miles and intersects with four states – California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Obviously, those states are under the greatest pressure, but with immigrants being bussed out of those states, northern cities are feeling the effects. Before his election in 2021, New York’s Democrat Mayor Eric Adams declared: “We should protect our immigrants. Period. Yes, New York City will remain a sanctuary city under an Adams administration.” Less than two years later, on August 9, 2023, Mr. Adams’ tone changed: “The City is in an unprecedented state of emergency…we are past our breaking point. For each family seeking asylum through the City’s care, we spend an average of $383.00 per night to provide shelter, food, medical care, and social services. With more than 57,300 individuals currently in our care, it amounts to $9.8 million a day…nearly $3.6 billion a year.”

 

As well, there are humanitarian issues. Traffickers who bring migrants to the southern border extort thousands of dollars from those in their care. Women and children are sexually abused. The amount of fentanyl seized at the border has increased six-fold, but even more has made its way into the country. The number of fentanyl-related deaths in the U.S. have risen five-fold in the past three years. Keep in mind, the precursor chemicals that comprise the essential ingredients of fentanyl come from China. They are shipped to Mexico where they are made into tablets, and then enter the U.S. via drug traffickers.

 

British Home Secretary Suella Braverman spoke to the American Enterprise Institute this week. In her speech she warned that the threshold for asylum claims under the United Nations Refugee Convention has been lowered, creating huge incentives for illegal immigration – “that simply being gay, a woman, or fearful of discrimination is now effectively enough to qualify for protection and, as a result, as many as 780 million people will be eligible to claim asylum.” Perhaps she exaggerated, but directionally she was correct.

 

Do western leaders fully comprehend what they have unleashed, as they move toward open borders, even as they deny doing so? In Tuesday’s The Wall Street Journal, Gerard Baker wrote: “The demographic tsunami from the global South, as the North’s population shrinks, is in its early stages, and most people can see clearly what happens when leaders insist on a moral code that suggests our obligations to indigent foreigners are as great as to our own citizens.” There have been times in the past when we should have taken in more asylum seekers than we did. For example, Jews trying to leave Europe in the late 1930s. We failed thousands of them. But that does not mean our borders should be open now.

 

Flight attendants instruct passengers traveling with small children, in the event of a drop in air pressure, to first secure your own oxygen mask, then the child’s. Similarly, before we let more illegal migrants overwhelm our cities and towns, we must ensure that our citizens are secure, our laws enforced, and that the values that helped mold this Nation remain intact. 

 

We are told that democracy dies in darkness. It does not. It dies in sunlight. It dies with the assumption of power by unelected bureaucrats. It dies when people abandon accountability and responsibility. It dies in the censorship of ideas and opinions that do not accord to an accepted narrative. It dies when mandates replace debate and compromise. It dies when the media equates opinion with news. It dies when we no longer see ourselves as the global standard for individual liberty. It dies when we lose the ability to defend ourselves and freedom-loving people around the world. It dies under the unintended results of foolish and unwise policies. Migration is almost as old as mankind, but the advent of the modern nation-state, after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, limited the freedom to migrate at will. Borders came to mean something. Today, if respect for borders continues to be ignored by political leaders and migrants, we run the risk of unleashing a backlash with potentially devastating consequences.  

"Age and the Passing of the Torch"

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Age and the Passing of the Torch”

September 23, 2023

 

“At twenty a man is a peacock, at thirty a lion, at forty a camel,

at fifty a serpent, at sixty a dog, at seventy an ape, at eighty a nothing at all.”

                                                                                                                                Baltasar Gracián (1601-1658)

                                                                                                                                Spanish writer and philosopher

                                                                                                                                The Art of Worldly Wisdom, 1647

 

For Queen Elizabeth, 1992 was her annus horribilis. I had my own – far less significant – diem horribilis last Sunday. Unlike Elizabeth’s year, some of what happened to me was, surely, age related. I had tested positive for Covid that morning. Then, feeling groggy and with slurred speech, I fell twice. Apart from a bumped head, bruised hip and ego, no damage was done. Nevertheless after the second fall, we called health services. Shortly thereafter I was taken by ambulance to a clinic and later to Middlesex Hospital. Tests showed no signs of a stroke or brain injury, and on Tuesday I came home, with a cane but that was because of the bruised hip.

 

The effects of age are not necessarily chronological, and they differ greatly from one individual to another. My father died at 58, while his father died one day shy of 90 and his mother at 92. While they became physically frail, both had their wits until they died. Cancer, heart disease, and senility are more common as one ages. Muscles lose tone and bones become brittle. But there are those like Henry Kissinger who are physically able and mentally alert at 100. Many people don’t let age stop them.  The Wall Street Journal, last June 25^th, published an article, “Why High-Powered People are Working in Their 80s.” In it they quoted data from the Census Bureau that roughly 650,000 Americans over 80 were working last year. My younger brother who turns 81 in October continues to work as a partner in an investment firm. My father-in-law went to work most every day as an admiralty lawyer, until he died at 77. Old age, mental acuity, and employment are not incompatible. For some, but not for all.

 

While Republicans have been vocal about the President’s physical and mental failings – based on visible evidence of dementia – the question of age has now been raised by Independents and Democrats. An August CNN poll conducted by SSRS found that “roughly three-quarters of Americans say they’re seriously concerned that Biden’s age might negatively affect his current level of physical and mental competence…” On the other hand, Alex Keyssar of the Harvard Kennedy School takes a more nuanced view. According to the July 17, 2023 issue of the Harvard Gazette, he “believes Democrats who cite age as a major election concern are probably really expressing ‘a desire for energetic leadership, a force for new ideas, new spirit, and new energy.’” Perhaps. But it seems more likely that the Democrat leadership is concerned that fibs, gaffes, and stumbles now define Mr. Biden – not good for his re-election chances, especially when his Vice President’s approval numbers are lower than his.

 

With Donald Trump currently leading the battle for his Party’s nomination, Republicans are caught in the same vise; thus a rising, bipartisan, interest in younger leaders. At his January 21, 1960 inauguration, John F. Kennedy spoke of “passing the torch” to a new generation. That happened. Eisenhower was the last President born in the 19^th Century. Franklin Roosevelt was fifty when he was elected in 1932, the first President younger than my grandfather. Kennedy was elected at age forty-three, the first President younger than my father. Bill Clinton was the first President elected younger than me. My grandfather, father and I were all in our 50s when the nation first elected Presidents younger than we were. Today, our three children are all in their 50s.  It is time to pass the torch. Following a recent TV interview in which President Biden touted his ‘wisdom’ and ‘experience’ as reasons to vote for him, Bonnie Wong, director of the neuropsychology program at Mass. General, allowed that there is some validity to the idea that with age comes wisdom. On the other hand, there are those who feel differently: H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) wrote in his 1919 book Prejudices: Third Series, “The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.” Age does bring perspective, but drifting minds are not compatible with wisdom. Nevertheless, it now appears that the 2024 election will consist of two, deeply flawed, old men, both accused of corruption and neither wise. We can picture them “yodeling,” as Lance Morrow wrote in Thursday’s The Wall Street Journal, “across the valley at one another: ‘Not guilty! Not guilty!’” Or, as P.G. Wodehouse more colorfully put it in The Inimitable Jeeves, the prospect resembles “…when Aunt is calling Aunt, like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps...” This is not a prospect most Americans want.

 

It is not just the last two Presidents – both running for re-election – who are old. The average age in the U.S. Senate today is 65. Political leadership in Washington resembles the Soviet Union’s Politburo of 1982 when the average age was 70. But age, alone, is not the issue. We all know octogenarians and even nonagenarians who are mentally alert and physically spry. While he was writing of women, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words are universally applicable: “The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.” Having cognizant-alert, elderly advisors has merit, as they can provide a sense of continuity and, despite Mencken’s warning, offer wisdom to new generations of more energetic politicians who will listen to, respond to and be honest with the people.

 

We who are older must adapt to life’s challenges. As J. Alfred Prufrock says, in T.S. Eliot’s eponymous poem: “I grow old…I grow old. / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” But that does not mean that our political parties should make the American people choose between one old man who is riven by an oversized personal ego and who speaks hatefully of those who cross him, and a second, even older man who trips boarding airplanes, who cannot speak without a teleprompter, and who utters non sequiturs that baffle his audience and his advisors.

 

Watching President Biden makes one wonder what it would have been like to observe President Woodrow Wilson after his October 1919 stroke? That was not permitted, as his wife and doctor kept him hidden from prying reporters. That cannot be done today. However, the White House keeps the President’s appearances to a minimum, and mainstream media, out of deference to the office, remains mute about Mr. Biden’s deteriorating mental capabilities. But our allies and enemies are aware of what is happening. Not a good look for the most powerful nation on earth. Age matters, but what is most important is how one ages. In the U.S. today, it is time to pass the porch.

The Lost Art of Writing Letters"

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“The Lost Art of Writing Letters”

September 17, 2023

 

“The gentle arts of conversation and letter writing have largely

given way, nowadays, to the intrusive urgency of the telephone.”

                                                                                                                Dorothy Lobrano Guth (1928-2016)

                                                                                                                Editor, Letters of E.B. White, 1976

 

Ms. Guth wrote the introduction to her godfather’s book of letters almost fifty years ago. Since, phones never leave our side. E-mails, text messages, social media, Snap-Chat, and Twitter (or whatever it is now called) have proliferated, like inebriated rabbits. Technology has increased by magnitudes the frequency and ways in which we communicate, allowing us to stay in touch with people in a way unimaginable to our parents and grandparents. In sending my essays by e-mail, I am in regular contact with childhood and school friends, unseen for decades. I hear from people I worked with at Merrill Lynch almost sixty years ago. There is much good in this, but…

 

While social media and myriad forms of communication provide benefits undreamed of a few decades ago, they have downsides. In our new, technologically efficient communication, grammar, spelling, syntax, and their progeny, thoughtfulness and the well-constructed sentence have receded in favor of succinctness and speed. Less concern for the recipient is given than when pen was put to paper. E-mails and text messages are responsive, not contemplative. 

 

Does an e-mail in your inbox spark the same excitement as a handwritten letter in your mailbox? As much as anyone, I am guilty of this omission. Most of my handwritten letters are ones of sympathy, or birthday cards to my wife, children and grandchildren. Yet I vividly recall the anticipation and receipt of a letter when at school – not the scolding or admonishing one from my mother, or the indulgent one from my grandmother, but the neat, identifiable one from a girl I knew or had recently met.  Mail call, when in the Army, was the highlight of the day. Now, when I descend to the mailbox, I expect and receive solicitations, advertisements, catalogues and bills. Ever so rarely there is a real letter, which I save.

 

Letters provide insights into the way people think and behave. An anthropologist, studying American social life, would have a treasure trove in private letters, especially those written with no expectation of being published. In the decision to publish the letters between my parents during World War II in Dear Mary, I wrote: “In the end, I decided their value as a window on a special time in our history seemed worth whatever embarrassment might accrue to those no longer alive.” But any study of American life through letters would end when their decline began in the 1960s and accelerated in the 1990s. 

 

Old letters are treasures and should be preserved. Every now and then one comes across a gem, such as that written by my mother’s youngest brother who, at age 24, had recently been given command of LST 601. Preparatory to the August 15, 1944 invasion of southern France, Prime Minister Churchill was there to wish the men well. My uncle wrote to his parents on August 13: “What a thrilling day was yesterday…I led the men in ‘three cheers for Churchill.’ Smiling and waving, he passed within fifty feet. He was in his blue playsuit looking just as much like little Sydney Williams as he could.”

 

Enough said; let’s write more letters!

"The Era of Big Government is Not Over"

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogsot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“The Era of Big Government is Not Over”

September 14, 2023

 

“I say again, the era of big government is over.”

                                                                                                                                President William J. Clinton

                                                                                                                                State of the Union Address

                                                                                                                                January 23, 1996

 

“For he on honey-dew hath fed/ And drunk the milk of Paradise;” so ends Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan.” Xanadu, an extravaganza, was located in Mongolia, north of Beijing. Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, was Emperor of China. Xanadu became his first capital, later his summer palace. Khan was the founder of the Yuan Dynasty and ruled China for thirty-four years (1260-1294). 

 

We in the United States have not been so grandiose…yet. However, in Washington there is a sanctimonious belief that all problems can be solved by government, that its bounty has no limits. In the September 12, 2023 issue of The Telegraph (London), Ambrose Evans-Pritchard and Jeremy Warner wrote: “The fiscal scale of Bidenomics is larger than Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s by a wide margin. It is larger than Johnson’s guns and butter in the 1960s, or Reagan’s military rearmament in the 1980s. We are witnessing an extraordinary experiment in U.S. economic policy.” The New Deal was a response to a global depression. Johnson’s Guns and Butter was to fund the Vietnam War and his “Great Society.” Reagan’s rearmament won the Cold War. Bidenomics was to mend the nation’s infrastructure, combat a pandemic that was already being addressed, and to fight inflation, a result of easy money, business closures during the pandemic, and rises in energy prices caused by Mr. Biden’s curtailment of exploration and production.

 

Expanding tentacles of our enlarged administrative state raise questions: How much larger can the federal government grow? White House employment alone, at 524 people, has grown by 27% in the past three years. Is it possible to shrink entitlements, the fastest growing segment of spending? What will be the effect of rising interest rates, which in two or three years will cost a trillion dollars a year? Interest costs are already roughly equal to defense spending. Will defense suffer in an increasingly dangerous world? (At 3.5% of GDP, defense spending is about half of what it was in 1982.) 

 

The numbers are sobering. U.S. GDP is estimated to be $27 trillion in 2023. Total federal debt for this year is estimated to be $32 trillion, or 118.5% of GDP. In addition, state and local debt were $2.1 trillion in 2022. To put those number is in perspective, the ratio of federal debt to GDP at the end of World War II was 117.5 percent. That ratio declined for several years, troughing in 1981 at 32.5%. Fitch Ratings recently lowered their rating on U.S debt from AAA to AA+, saying that “the ratio of debt interest to tax revenue will reach 10% by 2025, the level where it starts to create a snowball effect.” 

 

Led by the credit crisis of 2008 and the pandemic of 2020, the recent rise in debt has been a bi-partisan effort, first peaking above 100% in 2013. As Rahm Emanuel famously declared, “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” Neither the credit crisis nor the pandemic were wasted. A recent editorial in The Washington Postbegan: “In 2023 – with the economy humming – the federal deficit is spiking to $2 trillion, according to calculations from the Committee for a Responsible Budget.” Setting aside whether 2.1% GDP growth is actually “humming,” it is good to know the Left is taking notice.

 

When we look at federal expenditures, as a percent of GDP, they came down sharply after World War II, though never approached the levels of pre-World War II. During three War years (1942-1944) federal outlays exceeded 40% of GDP. For the next seventy-five years, expenditures remained in the general range of mid-teens to 20% of GDP, rising during recessions and falling during periods of economic growth, but inching toward the higher end of the range as time went by. That changed in 2020 when the response to COVID was to shut down the economy. Since, federal expenditures, as a percent of GDP, have consistently been above 24% of GDP. Entitlement spending, which has ratcheted up each year, now approaches 66% of total government spending. What will happen to the needs of defense, education, etc.? Will taxes be raised? Will benefits be cut? Will we be able to pay interest on the debt? Will the economy slow further?

 

The catalyst that has caught everyone’s attention is the rise in interest rates, compounded by the rise in debt. Fed Funds began 2008 at 4.25% and ended the year at 0.25 percent. They stayed at the level for the next twenty-seven quarters, despite positive – though anemic – GDP growth. The fact that the Dow Jones Industrial Averages rose 70% during those six years lends credence to the claim that low interest rates benefit asset holders and help to widen the wealth gap. Today, the rate on Fed Funds is 5.5 percent, having been raised to combat inflation. Will the Fed, again, be asked to accommodate ballooning debt?

 

No one would disagree that a healthy and growing private sector is necessary for an income-consuming government, yet as the private sector shrinks relative to the public sector the job becomes more difficult. Since 2000, and apart from two years during the George W. Bush Administration (2004 and 2005) and the bounce-back year of 2021 from COVID, U.S. GDP growth has consistently been under three percent. More government spending, higher taxes and increased regulation are brakes on economic growth. Is the current unemployment rate of 3.8% telling us that the economy is maxed out at 2.3 percent? We better hope not.

 

In contrast with today and apart from six years (1981, 1982, 1990, 1991, 1993, and 1995), the twenty years between 1981 and 2000, saw economic growth range between 3.46% and 4.79 percent. While wealth inequality did increase – in part due to the use of options in executive compensation – the incoming tide lifted all boats. Unemployment remained low and the S&P 500 rose from 136.34 to 1,320.28. Perhaps gaps in wealth and incomes will narrow as the tide ebbs, but what will that do for standards of living?

 

In 1986 at an August 12th press conference, President Reagan said: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’” Ten years later, in his State of the Union, President Clinton confirmed the sentiment. But the words must be placed in perspective. Government is necessary. Without it we would have anarchy. Government does much to help individuals, the elderly, the sick, and those no longer able to care for themselves. We need it to keep civil order, for education, and to protect us from enemies, at home and abroad. We need it to facilitate trade and to keep open sea lanes. We live in a nation of laws, under a representative government. We could no more survive without government than we could survive without air. But there are limits to what we can afford. A limited government is what we were given. We cannot smother free market capitalism that has enriched our lives. 

 

We need serious people to consider how big government can grow before we are impaled on a petard of our own making. We have only to look at Western Europe’s global decline to see our possible future. In an 1867 address at the University of St. Andrews, John Stuart Mill said: “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” Xanadu has not been built in the United States, but we live in an era of big government. We need wise and good people with common sense to tell the truth about the consequences of where we are headed.

"Ghosts on the Boardwalk"

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Ghosts on the Boardwalk”

September 9, 2023

 

“We’re all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us.”

                                                                                              Liam Callanan (1968-)

                                                                                              The Cloud Atlas, 2004

                                                                                              (Edgar Award for best first novel by an American author)

 

“If dreams are like movies, then memories are films about ghosts.” Those lyrics, written and sung by Adam Durwitz, are from the song “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby.” They reflect a truism, at least for me. As well, ghosts are common in literature. Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Washington Irving, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and J.R.R. Tolkien included spirits and ghosts in their stories.  

 

Embedded in memory, they flit in and out of my consciousness, triggered by a word, song or a photo. On a table in our living room, a digital picture frame presents a new photo every few minutes, letting the past slip into the present, recalling days gone by, and reminding me of those known and loved.

 

The beach club we belong to in New Jersey provides an embracing venue for such memories. It is where Caroline spent summers growing up. It is where our children spent a month or two every summer while they were growing up. And it is place familiar to our grandchildren. Caroline’s family has a long history there. Our bath house, where spirits of dead ancestors watch over never-known descendants, has been in her family since at least 1931. Her maternal grandparents joined the club a few years after its founding in the late 19^thCentury. My in-laws joined in 1931, and we joined in 1972. 

 

Some things change; others do not. The ocean, cleaner that it was half a century ago, is still captive to the motion of unchanging tides. The beach has shrunk and expanded. The people are different, yet faces are familiar. Walking along the boardwalk, I pass by tables seating children and grandchildren of those I knew sixty years ago. There are differences. In the mid and late ‘60s dress was more formal. Some of the older men, like my father-in-law, wore ties, and most of the older women wore dresses and low heels. One was more likely to see a cocktail than a glass of wine on the table. The times were more formal: gentlemen stood for ladies; we referred to our elders by Mrs. or Mr. But conversations have a familiar ring – families, current events, books read, movies seen, and gossip about neighbors.

 

We are forged in a crucible that includes genes from our forefathers and the environment in which we were raised and now live, combined with the influence of family, friends, coaches, and teachers. In returning to the club each August, I recall those no longer with us. I miss their greetings, their smiles and witticisms. While their loss is felt, I don’t despair. They live on, ghosts in my memory.

 

John Donne, who often wrote of the supernatural, began his short poem Meditations XVII: “No man is an island entire of itself; every man/is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;” Donne was writing of the metaphysical mysteries of death, but his words apply to our interconnected lives, where the past is linked to the present and future. I see those connections as ghosts, as I walk down the boardwalk.

"The Danger of Identity Politics"

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“The Danger of Identity Politics”

September 7, 2023

 

“We must reject the idea that every time a law is broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker.

It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.”

                                                                                                                    Governor Ronald Reagan (R-CA)

                                                                                                                    Speech, National Republican Committee

                                                                                                                     July 31, 1968

 

Identity politics has divided us into categories, convenient for politicians to address perceived concerns and, more dangerously, to exert control, turning us into a nation of oppressed and oppressors, so that Washington’s “progressives” can ride in as savior. Identity politics places the group above the individual, while those who think independently – outside the box – are slighted, demeaned, or cancelled. One consequence is rising distrust and hatred; a second is that the group, not the individual, defines who we are; and a third is a loss of faith in America, its history and in its accomplishments. 

 

Issues of identity have a long history. Women’s rights date back before the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments in 1848. My paternal grandmother, a well-educated woman, was forty-five when the 19^thAmendment was passed, allowing her to vote in 1920. It was in 1965, a hundred years after the civil War, that the Voting Rights Act directed the Attorney General to enforce the right of Blacks to vote. However, even as we made progress – slow as it has been – self-manufactured divisional bitterness increased. 

It is important to step back, not to rest on laurels, but to gain perspective and celebrate what our nation has achieved over more than two centuries. Winston Churchill, in a back-handed compliment, is alleged to have observed: “The Americans will always do the right thing…after they have exhausted all the alternatives.” America continues to evolve, too fast for some and too slowly for others. We are best off when momentum is deliberate, when we individually, as Governor Reagan is quoted in the rubric, accept responsibility for our actions.  Our country is unique in the annals of human history. It is based on the rule of law, and on the individual, his sovereignty and his uniqueness – “…that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…” Those words have evolved over time to include more of our citizens. We have further to go, but we have come a long way. We do not want to return to a time where some groups are favored, and others excluded, as identity politics would have us do. 

It is true that as social animals we seek out those with common interests, which explains why there are myriad groups devoted to such pursuits as fishing, bridge, antique cars, golf, and P.G. Wodehouse. It is why sororities and fraternities exist on college campuses, why there are different religious denominations, and why civic organizations, like Rotary, Elks, American Legion, and the Knights of Columbus, exist in communities across America. Fifty and sixty years ago, some of these organizations were restrictive, based on race, gender, and/or religion, but such restrictions lessened in the wake of the passage of civil rights legislation and as tolerance became more common. Man’s social progress has always been evolutionary. We live today in a nation more accepting and tolerant than that known to our grandparents. We have further to go, but we have been moving in the right direction.  

 

Today’s focus on identity politics is a setback. It has been fueled by political correctness and a desire for power, and it emits accusations of racism and denials of merit. It has created division and hatred, and it threatens to undo the good that has been achieved over the past two and a half centuries. It is, perhaps, most dangerous in the nation’s schools, on the nation’s college campuses, and in the armed forces. The fact that so many of our children, especially in inner city schools, cannot read or do math at grade level is an indictment of teachers’ unions whose funds support Democrat politicians in return for the monopoly they enjoy. Vituperative attacks have led to the cancellation of conservative speakers on college campuses. Demands that students conform to a preferred ideology has suppressed intellectual inquiry. Subjecting the military to “woke” ideologies is not smart in a dangerous world. In October 1933, at Albert Hall in London, Albert Einstein – having just left Nazi Germany – spoke: “If we want to resist the powers which threaten to suppress intellectual and individual freedom we must keep clearly before us what is at stake…Without such freedom there would have been no Shakespeare, no Goethe, no Newton, no Faraday, no Pasteur and no Lister…Most people would lead a dull life of slavery just as under the ancient despotisms of Asia. It is only men who are free, who create the inventions and intellectual works which to us moderns make life worthwhile.” 

 

It is natural for people to find others with similar interests, as opposed to the artificial compartmentalizing of people by skin color or gender. Immigrants to this country often live with others of a similar heritage. But after two or three generations, through marriage and association they assimilate into broader society. In New York City, Germantown is only a memory. Little Italy and Chinatown are no longer exclusive to Italians and Chinese.. 

 

Identity politics returns us to a world we had been escaping. Politicians find it convenient to appeal to specific identities: Blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians, native Americans, male, female, gays, transgenders and cisgenders, young and old. As Americans, we are all of those things – often a mixture – but a single category does not alone define anyone of us. It is the desire to live freely, to speak, to write, to pray and to associate as one chooses that has made the United States the unique nation it is, and it is why we have been a magnet for the world’s poor and oppressed. Let us keep it that way.