The Year of the Wrong Debate

In February, as Wisconsinites fought over the merits of Governor Scott Walker’s budget repair bill, I grew increasingly frustrated by my fellow cheeseheads.

We found ourselves stuck in an economic quagmire that trickled down to strap our state budget. It was a mess caused in great measure by our largest financial institutions and corporations, exacerbated by our embroilment in two costly wars, and facilitated by a Congress that failed to perform the most basic oversight entrusted to it.

But with all those elephants trampling not so quietly around the ballroom, we aimed our collective ire at middle-class citizens who dared to seek job security, a comfortable retirement, and good health insurance.

I struggled to control my anger as I heard one person after another talk about bringing teachers, snowplow drivers and state parks employees back down to earth from their exorbitant salary and benefits packages to suffer with those of us whose private sector bosses refused to offer such extravagances.

Eventually my anger spilled over into an article I titled “The Wrong Debate” (Feb. 25, 2011) because I couldn’t grasp how we had taken a problem that so clearly had its roots at the top of the ladder and directed our ire at our middle-class neighbors.

The article began as follows:

For two weeks, we’ve gleefully sunk into a relatively petty debate about pension contribution percentages, health care benefits, and wages for middle class Americans. Often, this argument has devolved into simple jealousies, of one middle class worker upset that another has, thanks to a strong union, better wages and benefits than they have. It often sounds unsettlingly childish: “I don’t have that so you shouldn’t.”

Fortunately, and to my great relief, many shared that frustration. The article garnered 60,000 pageviews on our website and was reposted in dozens of blogs and newsletters, becoming the most-read piece we’ve ever published.

Unfortunately, it didn’t refocus our debates in a year characterized by rudderless leadership.

Take our scientists and engineers. If you listen to those in the technology and engineering sectors, they’ll tell you we simply aren’t investing enough in the research that will net the next generation of jobs and innovation. They’ll tell you we don’t have nearly enough students coming up to fill the demand for engineers.

They’ll tell you that the cuts to NASA and the space shuttle program are deeply distressing, not because they desperately want to send people to Mars or collect moon rocks, but because they know we’re going to lose all the advances that come with the pursuit of such lofty goals. Those are the kinds of goals that can only be achieved through the cumulative efforts of a nation, efforts that can’t be outsourced.

At a time when everyone is panicking because China, India, and other parts of the world are rapidly catching up to the United States, if not surpassing us, we’re scaling back our investments in tomorrow’s technologies.

Tax cuts for corporations and investors are pretty far down the wish list of ways to reinvigorate the sectors that will determine who rises to the top of the sewage of a world economy we now swim in.

To these minds, the debate should not be about how much we can cut, but what are the best investments we can make to get ahead tomorrow.

We’re spinning our wheels right now because those in the statehouse, in Washington, and the rest of us when we sit around the dinner table or the bar aren’t debating the right questions.

Instead of debating whether executives who failed astoundingly at their jobs should keep their jobs or go to jail, we debated how much we should do to bail them out. Instead of debating the best way to subsidize homeowners so they could pay off their mortgages, we debated the best way to fortify the wealthy banks that held those mortgages with loan guarantees and taxpayer funds so they could pump up profit margins.

Instead of debating the merits and value of public programs, we simply debated whether we should cut or spend.

Author Scott Fitzgerald, in a July interview, summed up our national discourse as good as anyone, saying that “so many of our conversations about these issues, be it in media or at home, are just people defending positions rather than actually talking about the problems.”

And at the end of the year, we head into 2012 stuck in neutral, with those elephants still stomping around the room.