American Character Is at Stake

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WSJ: WSJ:[/articleshotarticle]

 

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT

8/31/12

 

The American republic has endured for well over two centuries, but over the past 50 years, the apparatus of American governance has undergone a radical transformation. In some basic respects—its scale, its preoccupations, even many of its purposes—the U.S. government today would be scarcely recognizable to Franklin D. Roosevelt, much less to Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson.

 

What is monumentally new about the American state today is the vast empire of entitlement payments that it protects, manages and finances. Within living memory, the federal government has become an entitlements machine. As a day-to-day operation, it devotes more attention and resources to the public transfer of money, goods and services to individual citizens than to any other objective, spending more than for all other ends combined.

 

The growth of entitlement payments over the past half-century has been breathtaking. In 1960, U.S. government transfers to individuals totaled about $24 billion in current dollars, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. By 2010 that total was almost 100 times as large. Even after adjusting for inflation and population growth, entitlement transfers to individuals have grown 727% over the past half-century, rising at an average rate of about 4% a year.

 

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They're Part of the Civic Compact

WILLIAM A. GALSTON

8/31/12

 

Nicholas Eberstadt assembles a host of empirical trends in order to reach a moral conclusion: that the growth of the entitlement state over the past half-century has undermined the sturdy self-reliance that has long characterized most Americans, replacing it with a culture of dependence that threatens the American experiment.

 

As far as I can tell, Mr. Eberstadt's statistics accurately represent the trends on which he focuses. But they are not the whole truth. To understand what is happening in American society with respect to entitlements, we need to take into account at least three long-term developments.

 

In the first place, we are an aging society. Our massive investments in public schools and universities at the height of the baby boom have given way increasingly to the funding of hospitals and nursing homes. A second trend has exacerbated the consequences of aging: the near-disappearance of the pensions and health insurance for retirees that employers provided in the decades after World War II. The third trend is macroeconomic. During the generation after World War II, the economy grew briskly, and the fruits of that growth were widely shared. Since then, growth has slowed, the distribution of gains has become more concentrated at the top, and less-educated workers have seen their wages stagnate while their benefits wither.

 

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