LETTERS: POLITICIANS AND TRUTH

To the editor:

I recently finished the book, "The Next Century," by Pulitzer prize-winner David Haberstam in which he takes a look at the changes taking place in world economics. I would like to share with your readers a few paragraphs from that work:

"Our dilemma is complicated. It is the inevitable product of three generations of affluence, which in turn created a culture of high expectations, which in turn created politics premised on high assumptions and high consumption.

"What had started in the early 1950s as a sense of possibilities gradually became expectations and then finally entitlement. Those who have memories of a poorer pre-World War II America, one touched by depression, where people (and the nation) had to make choices about spending, are older and increasingly in a minority. Whereas the grandparents bought nothing on credit and were appalled by the idea of owing anything, their sons and daughters started coming to the conclusion that there was such a thing as a mortgage and that a little credit was acceptable. Now we have the current generation, which believes that living in the present and paying in the future is the best revenge, that those who pay with cash are fools, too stupid to take advantage of our government that so handsomely rewards buying on credit. Whenever we see someone in front of us at an airline counter who is paying with cash, we make the immediate assumption that here is someone who is poor.

"But our political debate does not accept the new equation, that the years of easy affluence are over. It turns on the idea that everything is as it used to be. We may be a debtor nation, the greatest in the history of mankind, but the national debt, like the trade imbalance with Japan, is not an issue that mobilizes people and sends them to the barricades. We have become a nation divided: Our political system is still based philosophically on the glory days of hegemony, but our economic (and social) system is stumbling clumsily in the early days of the new international economy. The result is a society oddly oblivious of the new realities, a people and a nation living above their heads, and politicians who dare not tell the truth to the population."

The last presidential candidate that I can recall who told the truth was Barry Goldwater in 1964.

VANCE COMBS

Cape Girardeau