Читать книгу Northern Light: Lessons for America from Canada's Fiscal Fix - Robert P. Murphy - Страница 23

St. Augustine of Hippo knew something about both virtue and pleasure. On the one hand he knew that there would be rewards in heaven for men and women who lived the upright life. On the other hand, when he was younger, heaven seemed a very distant prospect and the pleasures of bad behavior seemed vivid and immediate. Thus his famous prayer: “Oh Lord, make me chaste and celibate – but not yet!”

St Augustine could well be the perfect candidate for patron saint of Washington D.C., where debt-obsessed Tea Party protestors wave placards saying “Hands off my Social Security.”

Both voters and politicians profess alarm about the looming fiscal crisis facing the United States, but they always manage to defer serious reforms because the problem never seems like an emergency just yet, and the pleasures of deficit spending just seem so inviting when compared to the hair shirt of fiscal reform. Certain politicians – especially if their party doesn’t occupy the White House – sound the alarm, commissions warn about the impending demographic realities, and everyone pays lip service to correcting the fiscal course of the ship of state. But nothing substantive ever seems to change.

The situation is now entirely different. The severe recession reduced tax receipts and accelerated retirement for many Americans, causing the Social Security program to take in less than it paid out years ahead of schedule. Government debt crises in Europe are leading commentators to speculate about the fate of the euro itself, something that would have been unthinkable to many just a few years ago. Europe’s situation has led Americans to reevaluate the strength of their own government’s finances, and wonder if the “unthinkable” could happen here as well, with little warning.

Yet there is hope, and it is the purpose of this book to show why. But first it will require an acknowledgement of the problem, and also a newfound humility. Americans view their nation as the leader of the free world and see their Founding Fathers as peerless giants who designed the ultimate framework for limited government. It will be hard to believe, therefore, that their “socialist neighbor to the north” – Canada – has some hard-won lessons to teach regarding the rollback of a bloated federal government. The present book is divided into three parts. Part I will lay out the grim realities of the US government’s fiscal predicament. In Part II we will describe the amazing success Canada had with fiscal and structural reforms beginning in the mid-1990s. Finally, in Part III of the book we will apply Canada’s lessons to the United States.