Krugman on "going dark"

Paul Krugman's column entitled "America Goes Dark" perfectly sums up what I think is wrong with this country. Read the whole thing, but if you're looking for a quick overview, his own words do the job well:

Everything we know about economic growth says that a well-educated population and high-quality infrastructure are crucial. Emerging nations are making huge efforts to upgrade their roads, their ports and their schools. Yet in America we’re going backward.

How did we get to this point? It’s the logical consequence of three decades of antigovernment rhetoric, rhetoric that has convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a dollar wasted, that the public sector can’t do anything right.

Libertarians like Ron Paul and his son Rand spew this bogus rhetoric, but I can respect them at least for (more or less) walking the walk. Mainstream Republican politicians, on the other hand, have fed ill-informed voters' desire to pay less than they should for government services they don't realize they're getting (Medicare is a government program, dummies), while at the same time lacking the courage to make meaningful cuts to those services. Those politicians know how much effective government really costs. They know they've contributed as much or more to the national debt in the last decade as the much-reviled Democrats, only their priority has been defense- and national security-related programs, some of dubious utility (keeping my shampoo off the plane is not, I aver, greatly helpful to aviation safety). Even with their much-ballyhooed devotion to our collective safety, Republicans have made some terrible decisions: for instance, the security screening at our major ports is still all but nonexistent due to the G. W. Bush administration's preoccupation with passenger air travel, a more visible, hence more politically important, element of the transportation security puzzle. (I'll admit, I don't know whether the Obama administration has put forth any greater effort to screen incoming cargo shipments.)

Oh, and there was the totally unnecessary invasion of Iraq, too. That Republican-led boondoggle has bled hundreds of billions of dollars from our national coffers and ballooned the debt to obese levels. Democrats weren't guiltless in the rush to war, but they weren't in power, either.

As usual in this benighted country, we're eager to embrace the simplistic because it keeps us from having to think. "Government is bad, it's wasteful, it's incompetent" -- once you make that your credo, you don't have to wonder whether it's just possible government does anything good, much less investigate how well it actually performs.

Wake up, dummies, before we do more damage to ourselves than we can repair.