It pained me to read in today’s
New York Times Sunday Business section a stinging critique of America’s
retirement system. A Dutch pension
specialist is quoted: “The rest of
the world sort of laughs at the United States – how can a great country get so
many things wrong?”
Retirement security is of course
a big issue for boomers and their children. The fortunate upper echelon has plenty of income and assets. As a country, however, our household
savings rate is stuck below two percent, one-fifth of the rate in Germany and
one-fourth that in Poland. These
days half the country struggles with low and stagnant earnings: when corrected
for inflation, the median household income still has not recovered to the 2007
level. Half the country’s
households have a net worth of $81,000 or less, an amazingly modest level down 40 percent from the 2007
peak. No savings,
falling incomes and declining net worth are a recipe for social and economic disaster,
yet no coherent national response has been forthcoming from elected officials.
My distress is all the greater
because the same scornful question can be raised with regard to many other
areas of American life. Once the
world’s greatest creditor, we are now the biggest debtor in history. We have a unbroken string of trade
deficits since 1976, adding up to almost $10 trillion dollars. Our industries have not expanded plant
and equipment for a decade or more.
Standards of performance, accountability and ethics are slipping in every
sector, it seems. Our
politics are gridlocked.
Generation-old problems go unaddressed while elected officials posture
and squabble. Our infrastructure
is increasingly antiquated and second-class. Our tax system is out of step with the rest of the world,
providing scant reward for the added saving, investing, producing and exporting
that we need on a sustained basis.
We govern ourselves as if neither
foreign competition nor shared prosperity matter. We think of ourselves as exceptional. In practice, we lack purpose and vitality
and are weak and irresolute. The
world has ample reason to laugh at us.
But America’s fecklessness is no laughing matter.
During an all-night negotiating
session in Geneva years ago, a veteran Asian ambassador said to me: “America is great because America is
good.” For years, I recalled those
words as a reflection of the respect and gratitude that America deserved for
its principled, far-sighted and dedicated leadership and the dynamism and high
standards of its people.
With the benefit of 30 years’
additional experience, I would amend the ambassador’s statement: America is great when America is good.
These days, it falls way short of what it could be, what average
Americans want it to be, and what the rest of the world needs it to be.
