Floor Speech of Senator Chuck Grassley
on the Outlook for U.S. Success
Delivered Monday, July 14, 2014
I would ask my colleagues to think about how many times they have made pessimistic sounding statements about America’s future. I want to talk about what I see as excessive pessimism about our great country because as public figures, what we say matters. Our attitudes matter, and the policies shaped by those attitudes can have an enormous impact, for better or worse, on the lives of Americans.
President Ronald Reagan often expressed that America’s best days are yet to come. Twenty-five years later, I still believe in Reagan’s optimism for America. In fact, President Reagan even ended his final letter to the nation, “I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.” His agenda reflected that optimism, and his policies worked toward a freer, more prosperous America. But, it seems such optimism about America’s future is out of fashion these days. Instead of searching for silver linings, many pundits and politicians see nothing but clouds.
For instance, after decades of hearing about how we are about to run out of fossil fuels, making energy in the future much more expensive and scarce, improved technologies have unleashed enormous reserves of natural gas. This increase in supply has driven down costs and caused electrical generation to switch from coal to natural gas. That in turn has led to substantial reductions in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. That’s a silver lining. Now the clouds… However, rather than celebrate the fact that the free market is achieving one of their long held goals, many environmentalists want to ban the technologies that led to the shale gas revolution based on unscientific claims of potential groundwater contamination. It would be a terrible shame to let all that planning for scarcity go to waste, so I guess we had better not take advantage of this nation’s resources.
We hear a lot of handwringing about the decline in manufacturing jobs, but this is partly due to advances in the manufacturing process, which require fewer, but more skilled and therefore higher paying jobs. The growth in American advanced manufacturing will require job training to fill those higher skilled, higher paying jobs, and we have a community college system that is rising to the challenge. This is an opportunity to in-source jobs that might otherwise be done overseas. That’s a good news story for American economic competitiveness and from the standpoint of wanting higher paying jobs for Americans. That’s the silver lining. Now the clouds… Still, the decliners are so heavily invested in the story of the decline of American manufacturing that it’s easier to bemoan the lack of economically inefficient, low-skilled jobs, which are the hallmark of an underdeveloped country.
The bursting of the economic bubble has forced Americans to spend less and save more. Spend less, save more: Good news. Now a cloud forming… The economic pundits call that a lack of consumer confidence. You could look at it as a reality check in the face of unsustainable credit card debt financed spending. Or, is it our national goal to get people to go back to saving less for the future and spending more today? You’d think so, based on what you hear on the news shows.
American entrepreneurs still produce a disproportionate share of the world’s major innovations. Still, we are cautioned that America is not graduating enough people with science and technology degrees, and the best and brightest in developing countries may soon decide to stay home to build their companies.
Doomsayers have existed throughout history. It is a sign of sophistication and intellectual refinement to predict the inevitable decline of your own society. Using 20-20 hindsight, the eventual decline of all of history’s great civilizations seems inevitable, so it’s logical to think our great nation will decline as well. Perhaps the so called “Great Recession” is a sign that America’s best days are in fact already behind us. Many people in the media and government seem so caught up in this narrative that they cannot see any other possibility. This fever is starting to spread to the general public as polls show a record number of Americans who think the next generation will be less well off than they are. As a result, a tremendous amount of energy is being devoted to figuring out how to manage America’s decline. This kind of historical determinism and pessimism is alien to the American character.
The rise of America as the most prosperous nation on earth was hardly inevitable 200 years ago. We owe our current level of prosperity to the entrepreneurial spirit and hard work of our forefathers, and yes, to their unbounded optimism in the future. An excessive focus on managing decline risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. For instance, there is a lot of concern about the decline of the middle class. But, instead of talking about how to unharness the entrepreneurial spirit that made America an economic superpower and grew the American middle class, all the ideas from our friends across the aisle seem focused on expanding dependency on government benefits.
While a succession of new EPA regulations rain down on businesses, causing them to pull back from expanding and hiring more people, the Democrats’ solution is to keep people on unemployment benefits for the long term. Expensive Obamacare mandates threaten to force small businesses to reduce employment hours and not hire more than 49 people. The Democrats’ answer? Mandate that small businesses pay a much higher minimum wage. Minimum wage jobs should be a stepping stone for low-skilled workers to begin climbing the economic ladder. However, when the economic engine stalls out, the ladder of opportunity becomes harder to climb and more and more people get stuck trying to make ends meet with low-wage jobs and no opportunity to get ahead. And what are the Democrats concerned about? Putting more people on food stamps.
The American Dream is about the opportunity to work hard and earn your own success in life. Proposals to expand the welfare state to the middle class assume that the American Dream is dead, and the best we can hope for is anemic economic growth with high levels of government dependency. That’s a defeatist attitude that reflects a distinct lack of faith in America. This is the old European model, which the experience of Greece showed to be unsustainable. In fact, the poster child for an expansive, European-style welfare state, Sweden, has cut taxes and reformed entitlement programs. If we keep planning for decline, we’ll get it. But, if we recover our faith in America’s potential, and redirect our energy toward removing barriers to economic growth and opportunity, America’s best days can still be ahead. I return to the words of Ronald Reagan in his final letter to America, “I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.”
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