Solemn Tones

[Doretta Castoe]

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The recent appearance of Senator Paul Tsongas at the Kennedy School was the occasion for an hour-long session of self-congratulation. Sponsored by Lead or Leave, the student organization dedicated to lobbying to reduce the national debt, the panel featuring Tsongas and other Massachusetts politicians had a clear message: the deficit is leading us to social collapse. Only by reducing the deficit to zero in the next seven years can we hope to save ourselves.

There was much back-slapping and grave head-shaking, as questioners and panelists announced how concerned they were, how much they had done for the cause, and how incredible it was that everybody else couldn't see what was so plainly necessary.

As is usual with discussions of the deficit, the exact way that this financial Apocalypse will come to pass was skipped over. Instead, the wonderful new term "intergenerational morality" was used, in solemn tones, to describe the moral crime implicit in deficit spending.

In conjunction with "youth tax," the righteously indignant slogan of Lead or Leave, "intergenerational morality" attempts to shame voters into making deficit reduction the nation's top priority. It suggests, vaguely, that the debt will come crashing down on the heads of today's children.

It is true that our budget deficit deserves attention. But Tsongas, Warren Rudman and their Concord Coalition use rhetoric that suggests that it is wrong by its very nature. In fact, borrowing money in order to spend it is morally neutral. Our judgment of such borrowing should depend on what it is used for; there can be good and bad deficits. But deficit spending in and of itself can be useful and should not be shamed out of the political debate.

The debate over deficit reduction often ignores an important point: the role of government is to improve the lives of its citizens. If deficit spending achieves this goal, it is wholly positive. By making the country stronger, it guarantees our ability to sustain the debt load. During World War II, for example, the nation carried a higher percentage of debt than it does now. Nobody cried "youth tax" then because the borrowing was for a good cause.

What is wrong is borrowing to finance shortsighted tax cuts and a useless military establishment, which is how our current $4 trillion debt was created. These expenses created no long-term sources of wealth or improvements in public welfare. Instead, they subsidized unproductive defense jobs and massaged the middle class into voting Republican. This wasteful expense sustained an artificial prosperity while allowing serious problems, like urban decay and inadequate medical coverage, to go unresolved. It was, in fact, the cause of our current economic problems.

But the specific qualities of the current deficit are extended by fiscal conservatives like Tsongas and company to apply to deficit spending in general. They are using it as a political weapon to create a permanent fear of spending. Long after the deficit is reduced, the specter of overspending will haunt national debate. Aggressive, ambitious new spending will always have to contest with the ghost of "intergenerational morality".

In the face of this underhanded threat to the premise of liberal government, it is imperative that a case be made for spending. In the next decade, America will desperately need to spend money to solve our social problems.

Urban poverty alone will require a giant commitment of money if it is to be stopped from turning all our cities into violent slums. Public resources will have to be mobilized against the spread of AIDS and other communicable diseases. Insuring adequate medical care for the entire population will require a lot of money.

If we go into this era of new and expensive social problems with the idea burned into our brain that the government must not run a deficit, we will be unable to meet these challenges. We must look at deficit spending as a tool, like any other tool the government possesses.

When used to help people, spending is good; when used to support waste and militarism, it is bad. We should reduce our current deficit, insofar as it is caused by defense spending, unnecessary entitlements for wealthy retirees, and corrupt subsidies. But we should be prepared to spend that much and more to solve the problems that lie ahead.

The government's primary goal is not to stay in the black. Nobody could argue with the proposition that we should spend only what is necessary. But we must be prepared to acknowledge that what is necessary will be very, very expensive.

The back-to-back remarks by President Trump and Democratic leaders appeared unlikely to do much to break the logjam that has left large swaths of the government closed. Three weeks into the shutdown, the strain was starting to show with hundreds of thousands of federal workers on track to miss paychecks this week.

Addressing the nation from the Oval Office for the first time, Trump argued for spending some $5.7 billion for a border wall on both security and humanitarian grounds as he sought to put pressure on newly empowered Democrats amid the extended shutdown.

Responding in their own televised remarks, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer accused Trump of misrepresenting the situation on the border as they urged him to reopen closed government departments and turn loose paychecks for hundreds of thousands of workers. Negotiations on wall funding could proceed in the meantime, they said.

Overall, Trump largely restated his case for the wall without offering concessions or new ideas on how to resolve the standoff that has kept large swaths of the government closed for the past 18 days. Speaking in solemn tones from behind the Resolute Desk, he painted a dire picture of killings and drug deaths he argues come from unchecked illegal immigration.

Trump ticked off a string of statistics and claims to make his case that there is a crisis at the border, but a number of his statements were misleading, such as saying the new trade deal with Mexico would pay for the wall, or suggesting through gruesome examples that immigrants are more likely to commit crime.

Trump, who has long railed against illegal immigration at the border, has recently seized on humanitarian concerns to argue there is a broader crisis that can only be solved with a wall. But critics say the security risks are overblown and the administration is at least partly to blame for the humanitarian situation.

The partial government shutdown reached its 18th day, making the closure the second-longest in history. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers are going without pay, and government disruptions are hitting home with everyday Americans.

Trump was nearly halfway through his 9-minute address before he mentioned the wall, describing it as a request from law enforcement rather than his longstanding political pledge. He also suggested that his proposal to build the wall from steel, rather than concrete, was a concession to Democrats.

Seeking to keep up pressure on Trump and the Republicans, Pelosi said the House would begin passing individual bills this week to reopen some federal agencies, starting with the Treasury Department to ensure Americans receive their tax refunds. The administration says it will act on its own to ensure the refunds.

THE people started climbing the hill in a cool rain from early in the morning of April 24, flowers clutched in their hands. Groups of schoolchildren in blue uniforms marched along the concrete path. An Army unit and its commanders carried a wreath. A delegation from a factory, men with tulips in their rough hands, followed. As the steady stream neared the top of the hill, loudspeakers carried the solemn tones of an ancient Armenian Church hymn. A troop of boy and girl scouts stood as an honor guard along the final walkway leading to the memorial.

Since 1965, when hundreds of thousands of Armenians poured spontaneously into the streets and marched here, this day has become a powerful expression of the Armenian sense of nationhood. For Armenians here and across the globe, this day commemorates what they call "the Armenian genocide," which began on the night of April 24, 1915, when Armenian intellectuals in Istanbul were rounded up.

The massacre is sometimes called "the forgotten genocide." According to contemporary accounts and generally accepted history, about a million and a half Armenians out of the 2 million living in Ottoman Turkey perished from 1915 through 1922, following sporadic terrorist acts against Turks by Armenians bent on gaining independence. Most of the Arme- nians died as the result of a policy of deportation and violence, with the remaining half million becoming refugees.

To this day, the Turkish government contends that the Armenian population was engaged in violent revolution during the time of World War I. Those who died perished as the result of a relocation policy, not from a preconceived massacre, the Turkish authorities insist.

Armenian-American historian Richard Hovannisian at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) calls this part of a "pattern of denial." This has not only been the response of the Turks, he argues, but also of the West, which went back on a World War I pledge to rehabilitate the survivors and restore an Armenian state.

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