As the so-called supercommittee in Congress labors to find solutions to our nation’s debt, its members might do well to travel to the Imperial Palace Casino Resort and Spa in Biloxi, Miss.
At the entrance to the casino, tour buses come and go day and night, faithfully delivering their cargos
of senior citizens. Some shuffling slowly, others with walkers, a few in wheelchairs, many smoking cigarettes and a good number overweight, they make their way to a building that awaits 24 hours a day, seven days a week, every day of the year.
Inside, in vast rooms redolent of smoke, patrons
can wander among seemingly endless rows of buzzing, flashing slots with names like Cinderella and The Queen. There’s even a machine called Uncle Sam.
Sitting before whatever device speaks to them, people stare vacantly at the spinning dials and feed in their money via convenient electronic ca
rds that painlessly record their losses. It’s all handled so easily that even when the screens, bells and lights announce an occasional win, there is no need to shovel out trays full of coins. With the mere push of a button, any digitized gains are fed right back into the machines as the lure of intermittent reinforcement and the statistical law of large numbers inexorably take their toll.
The more you gamble, the better your odds of losing, says that law. But someone has to win something sometime, so on it goes, mathematics and probability be darned.
Biloxi, you may recall, was nearly wiped out by Hurricane Katrina a few years ago and rebuilt largely with the support of money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Small Business Administration and other federal agencies. The FEMA website reports that in this one community alone, more than $170 million went to individual assistance and $450 million to public assistance to rebuild damaged infrastructure. For the Katrina-affected region as a whole, the Small Business Administration doled out more than $10.3 billion, the Department of Housing and Urban Development gave $16.7 billion, the Department of Labor nearly $250 million, the FEMA Flood Insurance Program $16.1 billion, the Veterans Administration spent more than $1 billion to replace and repair facilities, and the Army Corps of Engineers has spent multiple billions more on levees and other repairs. All this is only a partial accounting of the total federal aid sent to bail out the region for this one disaster alone.
Very near Biloxi is one of the nation’s leading military shipyards. There, workers literally stitch together the carbon fiber and weld the steel that will eventually become one of the most advanced naval weapons delivery systems in the world. A single vessel under construction there now carries a price tag of $3.3 billion for the vessel alone, not including crew, maintenance, etc. There is much well-founded concern here about the prospects of defense cuts should the supercommittee not produce a plan that can be passed, or come up with its own reductions in military spending.
If a person is extraordinarily lucky at the Imperial Palace casino and they happen to fly home through the Houston airport, they might stop by the executive lounge and pick up a copy of a magazine billing itself as “The technical guide to luxury watches.” There, one finds all the latest news about high-end timepieces. One example, the Legacy Machine No. 1, is described as “Wild, extreme, outrageous, unrestrained.” The price of this foreign-made watch? Ninety-two thousand dollars. According to one publication, they are already sold out for the next three years.
It’s fun to scream about the politicians in Washington not knowing how to fix the country, but the truth is many of those problems don’t originate as much from smoke-filled rooms in Washington as they do from the smoke-filled caverns of countless casinos just like the Imperial Palace. If large numbers of senior citizens can afford to gamble away their money at slots, if so many can afford to smoke cigarettes that ruin their own health and drive up everyone’s medical costs, how can we defend the idea that entitlements cannot be touched in order to reduce debt on our children?
At the same time, if some people are so wealthy they can afford to buy $92,000 foreign-made watches, can anyone seriously argue that asking them to do a little more to help their country in a time of crisis is “class warfare”? Seriously, $92,000 for a watch? (The name of that watch magazine, ironically, is Revolution.)
Meanwhile, many of those who shout the loudest that we cannot increase tax revenue by even a penny are the first in line to claim more than their fair share of FEMA dollars when the inevitable disaster comes their way.
To further understand how we got here, consider that in the past 10 years, tax cuts have reduced federal revenues by $2.8 trillion, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost at least $1.3 trillion (not counting long-term costs) and the Medicare prescription drug program has cost more than $280 billion.
So here is the state of things: The supercommittee is tasked with lowering the deficit and moving toward balancing the budget, but many voters don’t want to cut entitlements, others don’t want tax increases or defense cuts, and it seems everybody wants to blame someone else for the sake of political gain or personal self interest. All this is happening in a never-ending political theater where reason and compromise are dirty words that can cost a candidate an election.
Given all that, why can’t those darn politicians just balance the budgets and get this country back on track? We ought to just throw all the bums out!
Of course, lots of people enjoy gambling and smoking and the $92,000 watches really do look beautiful and might be fun to own. It is also true that national defense is absolutely a central responsibility of government, and it is good for the nation to pull together and help one another in times of disaster. But this is not really just about gambling or smoking or gold watches, natural disaster aid or weapons systems. Those are symptoms of something much deeper, much more fundamental to what is happening to our country.
At the core of our nation’s problem, we seem to have lost track of the difference between fantasy and reality, want and need, work versus luck, reason versus rhetoric. We will never really solve our national problems until we deal with those underlying contradictions.
As the supercommittee does its work, wisely now out of the glare of instant “breaking news,” and as it soon must offer a product to Congress and the American people, we all have a unique opportunity to help them and our country.
Instead of sending self-serving and simplistic demands and ultimatums, instead of signing on to political threats from one side or another, imagine if people, regardless of party, sincerely communicated a much different message:
“Be honest about the problems, work together for the greater good, and don’t be afraid to ask us all to change or sacrifice together for the good of the country.”
Just imagine that.
When people speculate about what the supercommittee will produce and what the members of Congress will do about it, the reference is usually to what they are going to do and how it will affect us. The better question is to ask what we are going to do and how it can help everyone in Congress and the administration do the jobs we say we want them to do.
The fact is, there are ways to get the budget back in balance and the nation back on track. But if each of us as individuals wants to keep doing exactly what we have been doing all along without any change or sacrifice, it simply isn’t going to work.
Imagine, if instead of asking politicians to take pledges not to raise taxes or not to touch entitlements, voters themselves took a pledge. A pledge to support, regardless of party, only those representatives or candidates who are willing to tell us the truth, work together and ask us all to do our part to help solve the problems.
Unless we are willing to do that ourselves, how can we ask or expect the committee members and our elected representatives to put forward real solutions?
How the supercommittee works
The mission of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, better known as the supercommittee, is to recommend at least $1.2 trillion in federal deficit savings over the next 10 years.
The 12-member committee is composed of six Democrats and six Republicans, half from the Senate and half from the House of Representatives. It is co-chaired by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas).
The committee has until Nov. 23 to agree on a recommendation (by a simple majority), which will receive an up-or-down vote in Congress before Dec. 23.
If the committee fails to agree on a plan, or if Congress fails to enact it, $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts would begin in January 2013. Half of those would come from defense programs. Medicare and Medicaid benefits would be exempt, with the exception of payments to providers.
About the author
Former U.S. Rep. Brian Baird, a Democrat, represented the 3rd Congressional District in Southwest Washington for six terms. He chose not to run for re-election in 2010, and now lives in Edmonds. Baird’s recently published book, “Character, Politics and Responsibility,” is available at lulu.com.
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