Serious Implications

This is Part 3 of Stewart Udall’s Letter to My Grandchildren. Udall makes it clear that national emergencies can bring tremendous opportunities. The Great Depression and World War II ultimately brought the policies and efforts needed to build a strong, broad-based middle class. Some excerpts:

Despite the tragedies of the war, what etched the overall experience in memory was the spirit that guided individual decisions and behavior. It was manifest in a creed of sharing and comradeship captured in the evocative postwar film, The Best Years of Our Lives. Those were memorable years for all of us because we dedicated our lives to a common purpose that excluded thoughts of personal gain or personal safety…

It was on display in the GI Bill of Rights, which gave returning soldiers a chance to get a good education. Its concept of sharing could be seen in the rapid growth of a middle class, and in the opportunities afforded veterans to establish small businesses…

In addition, a Depression-born abhorrence of debt resulted in the elimination of a vast war debt. My generation believed in balanced national budgets. As a consequence, leaders of both political parties voted for tax rates that, in the next 25 years, substantially wiped out the debt imposed by the war. To those who fought that war, it was unthinkable to put even part of the repayment burden on our children.

Udall’s right about the paydown of national debt after World War II, as these graphs indicate (related post: The End of Savings).

The national debt as a fraction of GDP fell until Ronald Reagan ushered in the supply-side “Reaganomics.” Reagan cut taxes and spent lots of money on defense contracts. Once all new war machines were built, it was only natural to find opportunities to use them. Such oportunities were Granada, Afghanistan (Charlie Wilson’s War), Panama, Haiti, Kosovo, Somalia, Iraq I, Afghanistan post 9/11, and Iraq II.

Now, as we begin to come to grips with the enormous, overarching energy-environmental problem, we need to heed the counsel of President Eisenhower, a military man who became a peace president. Ike excelled at ending wars other countries started. For example, as president he refused to use military force to rescue the French in Vietnam.

Eisenhower, in his much-admired farewell message, warned Americans to be wary of the growing military-industrial complex that would subsequently saddle the American people with the extravagant huge costs for an imperial presence in the world. Today our nation is spending more on military expenses than all the world’s other countries combined! It is instructive to listen to Ike’s advice about the use—and abuse—of military power.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired,” the outgoing president warned in his farewell message of January, 1961, “signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, and the hopes of its children.”

I think I would have liked Ike.