When Americans think of national vulnerabilities, their minds turn first to international terrorism or to possible security threats from the likes of North Korea or, maybe, in the future, China.
Yet our real vulnerability has been shown not to be from bombs and missiles, but from an economic recession that has exposed our tattered social safety net as an object that resembles Swiss cheese, and the fact that secure funding for vital public services such as education is a fantasy.
While private sector job losses have hit globally, only America, among leading industrialized nations, is seeing teachers, police and fire and other key public employees being laid off. This is folly of a high order. It’s bad enough losing private-sector jobs but when we slash public jobs not only are we adding to the pernicious effects of the recession by increasing unemployment, but we are hurting our children and the most vulnerable in our communities who rely on government services the most. How will slashing teachers and school librarians help our kids to compete with their international peers who are fortunate enough to be living in countries not plagued by such terminal myopia?
It has become clear that the impact of Obama administration’s stimulus package has been to mitigate the cuts in state budgets. That is not meant as a criticism. In fact, without the stimulus many more states and would be facing fiscal disaster and their people more pain.
A recent piece on PBS’s News Hour highlighted how the Hartford, Connecticut, school district had been making recent strides in improving test scores with innovative policies, and were looking to federal stimulus money for education to further boost their efforts. Instead, the governor of the state slashed education funding and the federal stimulus money will be used to “flat line” meaning it will replace the state funds, hopefully without substantial cuts.
And Connecticut is one of the lucky states; in my own state of Washington, the stimulus money will not make up for state cuts, and school budgets are being slashed. Few state governors have had the courage to propose temporary tax increases to help get us through this terrible spell and avoid damaging cuts in education, health and other social services.
Depressingly, it goes without saying that as more Americans lose their jobs they are also losing their healthcare insurance, thanks to our lack of universal medical insurance. Americans, in fact, are suffering in this recession far more than people in any other industrialized nation; we seem unable to understand that America cannot be strong abroad when it is weak and vulnerable at home.
President Obama understands this as well as anyone else in the country; it’s really too bad that so many of his fellow citizens don’t.
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