Debt, deficits and dependency politics

MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images

President Obama at a FEMA center set up in the wake of superstorm Sandy. There have long been questions about how well government is prepared to treat disasters and other social ills.

When my father was alive, he would regularly comment on the generosity of Americans. An immigrant born to a very poor Greek family, and the youngest of 14 children, he was amazed at how our country pulled together to help the less fortunate.

?The American people give and give. Even the cheap ones. It?s incredible,? he would say.

In his home country of Greece, it wasn?t always that way. It was tough to get a drachma from a friend, let alone for a cause like Easter Seals. The rapacious beast that is government in the Mediterranean nation had made millions reliant on government handouts, pensions and other boosts. That dependence made many of its people lazy. They weren?t succeeding, just hanging in there with little effort.

Little success left little room for generosity. Instead, it left the country crippled by a gimme-my government-check mentality, with tax evasion running rampant.

As U.S. federal government overreach expands, exerting ever more control and power over its citizens, Washington starts to look ever more like Athens ? in the scariest way possible.

To pay for the high public spending the White House deems necessary requires massive increases in revenue. That means government may well have to begin to limit deductions to pay for social programs, thus leaving less for personal giving.

Nanny state public spending and politicians pushing dependency could thus lead to a drastic deterioration of our benevolent culture.Selfless attitudes towards giving could curdle into selfishness.

This is something that President Obama does not, unfortunately, seem worried about. He put forward a version of a charitable deduction cap in 2011 ? a limit on the percentage of income that wealthy donors could write off ? to help pay for his American Jobs Act, a bill full of public projects, spending and tax hikes (which even his own Democratic Senate didn?t pass).

At the time, institutions that benefit from charitable gifts, such as universities, art museums and so forth, objected vehemently to the limit. They survive largely via the contributions of the wealthy, who in turn get tax breaks for their donations.

But with our country on the precipice of falling off another fiscal cliff, the same proposal is on the table as talk of raising revenue crescendos ? and Obama is returning to it with fresh energy in the wake of his reelection. If charity isn?t excluded from a cap proposal, expect to see this same opposition rise up again.

Then there are the effects of the social division and class warfare that Obama used to get re-elected. Though our nation was seemingly starting to heal from the racial, class and culture wars o the 21st century, the re-election campaign he launched left us more fractious than ever.

The takers loathe the achievements of the makers, and the makers feel they already fund the welfare state of the takers. America is, sadly, not in a good place.

Last year, the United States ranked as the most generous country in the world according to the Charities Aid Foundation. This analysis was based on three measures: volunteering, helping strangers and donating money (an impressive $212 billion).

?We pay less tax as a share of our income than citizens of virtually every other rich economy in the world. But we contribute more to charity than citizens of any other country,? wrote Eduardo Porter of the New York Times.

And we have more faith in philanthropy than we do the public sector. A study conducted by Bank of America and the Institute on Philanthropy at Indiana University found that faith in the government to help society was limited. Of the respondents, 91% said they trusted nonprofits? ability to solve societal problems. Only 56% trusted the federal government to do so.

We should be distrustful. Just look at the response to natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina and superstorm Sandy. While it has been slightly better in Sandy than it was in Katrina, FEMA continues to fumble, at least if you listen to the hard-hit residents of Staten Island and the Rockaways. There are real limitations to what government can do.

The more severely our nation slides into financial collapse, the weaker we get. The weaker our country gets, the less it gives, leaving a less-than-capable public sector to step in and play a role that?s ultimately too large ? and often too incompetent ? for it to handle.

If this continues, uniquely American altruism will dissolve. That is the real root of all this, and the tragedy of dependency politics.

andrea@andreatantaros.com

Source: http://feeds.nydailynews.com/~r/nydnrss/opinions/~3/Ob_fMeOOW8Q/story01.htm

Medal of Honor Warfighter Richard Mourdock d t p zynga Tropical Storm Sandy