Rantle

By Eric Anschutz. December 10, 2008

One of the more pressing questions about aging is this business of wisdom. The old adage says that wisdom comes with age. But, now that I have indisputably reached the age at which wisdom should have come to me, I can testify that it ain’t so. Maybe for some of you out there, the wisdom genie has tapped you on the shoulder, but not me. I keep waiting for some kind of a revelation, for greater understanding, for an ability to think faster or to know more. Maybe it will come at ninety – but it sure hasn’t come to me at (almost) eighty.

There are, of course, other ways to measure the impact of aging. One that strikes me as important is perception. And there, I do think some good has come from all these years. I see the world as more beautiful, not because visual acuity has sharpened, but because I have more time to look for and to appreciate beauty, and because I look now through the optics of eight decades of experience. The same can be said for friendship; with age it has become easier to love people, and somehow simpler to appreciate their qualities. The reciprocal is true, too: most of us of advanced years don’t waste time on relationships that have no meaning or that don’t hold our interest.

That notion raises the specter of tolerance. On this subject, it is America that has come of age, not us. The America in which those of my years grew up was an intolerant place; blatant racial discrimination is a blot on our history; the same can be said of religious intolerance and discrimination, and of political demagoguery, ala Joe McCarthy. But in the span of my eight decades, things have changed, decidedly for the better. Young Americans of today are far more accepting (even embracing) of racial and religious and political differences, and they have taken us older Americans through a presidential election in which we joined with the young of all races to embrace with fervor an African American candidate. That growth in our tolerance, and in our acceptance of diversity, has come about not because we became better or more sensible with age, but rather because our children and grandchildren blazed the trail to a better America, and led us to it.

Any span of eighty years would encompass a wide spectrum of events, but I daresay that the surge of mankind’s mastery over the universe during the past eight decades has been dazzling. My eight decades, which began with the calamity of the great depression, witnessed a surge of technological growth greater and more exciting than ever before in history: telephone, radio, television, manned landings on the moon and the landing of robots on Mars, radar, computers, instant global communications through tiny hand-held devices such as those remarkable Blackberrys and iPhones, the world wide web and Google, Skype, penicillin and Salk vaccine, to name just a few of the more obvious technological wonders of our time.

But all this technological progress during the years of our lives is in a sense overshadowed by the lack of progress in man’s ability to live in peace. While technologists have enabled us to convert sunlight and wind to electricity, the world of geopolitics remains mired in tribal warfare; aggression and violence are still an accepted path to conflict resolution. Indeed, the methods of war are essentially unchanged since the beginning of recorded history – unchanged except that warfare has become far more deadly with each passing year. Why has political science not made strides comparable to those made by physical science and chemical science and biological and medical science? We have conquered time and space and polio and tuberculosis, but been unable to find ways to avoid World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the calamitous insult of 9/11.

Back to aging: Pablo Picasso once said: “Age only matters when one is aging. Now that I have arrived at a great age, I might just as well be twenty.” Picasso was right. I do think from time to time about the swift passage of years from 30 to 50, and more recently from 70 to 80. The fact that the years – even the weeks and the days – pass by so swiftly is of course a matter of special interest to those of us of advanced years. But, for some reason, that interest is not maudlin, nor is it a matter of regret or concern. These post-retirement years are for many of us the best years of our lives. The pressure of career and the demands of work and of raising families are gone. We now have time to savor life – to smell the flowers. Picasso had it right, once you get past the fact that you are at a “great age,” you might as well be twenty – albeit with the interests of and the limitations of a person many times twenty.

Some reflections on aging (found on Google):
• Eventually you will reach a point when you stop lying about your age and start bragging about it.
• The older we get, the fewer things seem worth waiting in line for.
• When you are dissatisfied and would like to go back to youth, think of Algebra.
• Long ago when men cursed and beat the ground with sticks, it was called witchcraft… Today, it’s called golf.

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By Eric Anschutz, November 26, 2008

Much was said about tax policies during the recent race for the Presidency. In advocating lower taxes, Sarah Palin taunted Joe Biden’s assertion that paying taxes was the “patriotic” thing to do. Like Biden, I think it is our patriotic duty, but whether one thinks it is patriotic or not, most thinking people would agree that paying taxes is essential to the maintenance of a civilized society.

None of us would want to live in an America without interstate highways, bridges, tunnels, subways, railroads, harbors, safe water, reliable electrical grid and clean air. When we go to the gas station to buy ten gallons, we want to rely on the accuracy of the gas pump readings; when we buy meat or milk at the grocery store, we want to rely upon their quality and freshness. When we deposit money in our bank account, we want a guarantee of its safety. All of this, and countless more (police, schools, firemen, parks, waste collection and disposal) is needed to create and sustain a civilized, safe and comfortable society, and to bring that about we need a plethora of government agencies to oversee, monitor, design, construct and guard our infrastructure and our commerce. We need government to arrange and administer all of this, and the government needs tax revenue to bring it about. To do it well, we need more of both than a tax-averse American electorate is willing to vote for.

Republicans run, always, on a platform of lower taxes. All of us favor efficiency in government, and we need to be relentless in weeding out corruption and waste, and dumb programs need to be eliminated. Having said that, I would argue that we need higher taxes, not less, including at state and local levels. And, I would argue further, that tax policies should be more sharply progressive. The wealthiest among us can afford to pay more. To argue, as supply-siders do, that Obama’s reversal of Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, and that Obama’s promised return to Clinton’s top tax rate of 37.5% (only 2.5% increase from Bush) would reduce incentive to invest and work, is specious at best, and deceptive at worst.

In the end, it costs more when we defer investment in first-class infrastructure; levee failures in New Orleans, and the failed bridge in Minneapolis/St. Paul testify to that. Because the American electorate is reluctant to pay enough taxes, infrastructure across our nation is inadequate and in a disgracefully shabby state of disrepair. Two examples demonstrate the negative consequences of tax aversion: our under-funded schools turn out children unable to compete with those of Asia and Europe; congressional refusal to pass a carbon tax has made it impossible for solar and wind technologies to compete with coal and oil, and our nation continues therefore to despoil the environment and to invite the disaster that will result from global warming.

Too many of us listen to the inane prattle of those who advocate lower taxes as the solution to all ills. Forgetting that individual taxpayers do not build roads or schools or levees, too many of us are persuaded by the simplistic assertion that “your money belongs to you, and you know better how to spend it than does the government.” Because Democrats have been too timid to press for more tax revenue (and until recently haven’t had the votes to bring it about), we are fast becoming a second-rate nation, without the government resources needed to create the “shining city on the hill,” to borrow a worthy phrase from President Reagan. That’s the America we all want, but we won’t have it unless we are willing to pay for it – and by that I mean agreeing to increases in tax rates for those of us who can afford to pay – those with high incomes. This isn’t socialism, folks, it’s common sense. Indeed, in some ways, the wealthy among us are more vulnerable to the bad effects of a shabby urban environment that are the poor. None of us wants to live in (or near to) cities ridden with crime and dirty air and bad roads and rundown public buildings and third-rate schools.

One more point needs to be made: investment in infrastructure is, in the long term, not an expense: it is an investment – in time it pays for itself. Better roads result in less traffic jams, with the result that people can go on to be productive rather than idly waiting for traffic to unsnarl; moreover, unsnarled roadways result in less exhaust gasses, thereby improving our health and our environment. Investment in schools results in a more productive work force; investment in health care reduces time spent away from productive enterprise. Investment in world-class public transportation for our cities, and in high-speed trains between major cities would clearly pay for themselves. Benefits to our communities from better-manned and equipped police, firefighters, trash pickup and disposal are too obvious to merit further discussion. The list goes on.

Lastly, infrastructure improvements and strengthened urban services provide jobs, millions of jobs, jobs that cannot be outsourced. Doing all of this, and doing it aggressively, is at the center of President-Elect Obama’s economic improvement policies. Let me say it again: Biden was right: paying taxes IS patriotic because our tax dollars, wisely invested, improve our country – and the lives of it’s citizens. What could be more patriotic than that?

By Eric Anschutz, November 12, 2008

I write this column on the day after the election. The time has come to reconcile differences, and to unite in support of our new President and new Congress. As we transition from the failed policies, the tragic wars and inept administration of the Bush years, the incoming Obama administration inherits a wrecked and depleted economy, a foreign policy landscape that includes two unfinished wars, worldwide misgivings about any American claim to moral leadership, and domestic anxiety compounded by distrust of the direction of our country.

To repeat some of what I said in my column of last week, we need to work together to regain economic prosperity, to find peace – not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in the Mid East generally, to restore America’s alliances and moral leadership, put our nation once again on the path to scientific and industrial greatness, put our country and the world on the road to a “green” economy, repair our neglected infrastructure, fix our woefully inadequate K-12 education system, and find a way to provide world-class health care for all citizens. That’s a tall order for our new president and our new congress, and they must do it at time when our economy is in the doldrums, or worse.

A new President Obama’s first days in office will include long meetings with economic and military and diplomatic advisors, focused on how to repair our failed economy, how best to responsibly extricate our troops from Iraq, devise a new strategy for success in Afghanistan and in the “war” on terror, how best to negotiate favorable outcomes with Iran and North Korea, how to establish productive interaction with China and Russia, and how to repair our relationships with a world alienated by Bush’s unilateralist and militant foreign policy.

Some military advisors may seek to deflect Obama from his plan to put the Iraq war behind us. They will argue that the situation in Iraq has improved, and if we stay just a bit longer, we can achieve success. If we leave now, they can be expected to assert, there will be chaos. Let’s think about it. The current relative quiet in Iraq (interrupted, to be sure, by bombs going off every day or two, and by the deaths of “only” eleven of our soldiers last month) is achieved by the courageous efforts of some 140,000+ American troops. To maintain the current relative quiet, most of those troops would need to stay for the foreseeable future; there is no evidence to the contrary. We have been “training” Iraqi troops for some six years to take over the security function, but they remain unable to function effectively and reliably. The problem is clearly not training; it is that they remain essentially subordinate to the presence of US troops. Iraqi troops will not place themselves in danger as long as we are there to do the dirty work for them. It has been said countless times by Bush, and parroted by McCain, that “we will stand down when they stand up.” What we should say instead is that “they will stand up when we stand down.” That, in a nut-shell, is Obama’s Iraq policy, and he needs to insist upon implementing it, despite any urgings to the contrary from General Petraeus.

Iraq, and its cost, is directly relevant to the economic crisis in America. Just think about how much better off we would be economically if we had not spent some $1 trillion or more in Iraq during the past six years. Every added month of our stay in Iraq means the expenditure of another $12 billion. This is money desperately needed for modernization and rebuilding of our sagging and decaying infrastructure, for the development of alternative energy, and for job creation – not to mention bailout of our failed financial institutions. We need to press the Iraqi government to rebuild Iraq using the $80 billion that Iraq has on deposit in New York banks. Our dollars are needed to rebuild our own country.

Obama has promised to commit $15 billion a year for ten years to develop and deploy renewable energy (solar, wind and the like), aimed at relieving us of our dependence on carbon-based fuels (oil, coal and natural gas). Building the new “green economy” would result in millions of new jobs, and it will provide American business with products that can be sold abroad. Obama proposes also to rebuild our domestic infrastructure by creating a $6 billion per year federal infrastructure bank. The (nominally conservative) US Chamber of Commerce has said: “We’ve let things lapse for 20 years. The pipes, wires, asphalt, bridges and radar systems are old, and everything seems to be falling apart at once.” Paying for all of this will be a challenge, met in part by savings from stopping the war in Iraq, and by raising taxes for those with incomes over $250,000. Remember too that money spent on alternative fuels and infrastructure is an investment that will pay for itself many times over in years to come. The real cost would be in not doing these things.

To conclude: Obama offers the promise of a new America, one that invests its resources in rebuilding our economy, our infrastructure, our industry and our science, and development of a foreign policy that eschews bellicosity and confrontation in favor of diplomacy and moral leadership. General Colin Powell has called Obama a “transformational” figure. Most of Europe and Asia and Africa greet Obama’s election to the Presidency as the dawn of a new era of international unity and conciliation. Time will tell – and a hopeful world will be watching.

I close with a farewell to our dear friend, Barbara Robinson, whose death two weeks ago has robbed our world of one of its better people. Sidsel and I will miss her – and we extend yet again our heartfelt condolences to Duke, her beloved husband, and our beloved friend.