is on more solid footing, we have to do some significant work to get the deficit under control. These things are going to eat us up if we aren’t careful. Fortunately, President Obama has appointed a national bipartisan commission, headed by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, a Democrat and a Republican, to deal with the deficit and give us a report after early December. Erskine Bowles was the chief of staff for Bill Clinton in the latter part of the Clinton years, and he negotiated a balanced budget with Newt Gingrich and Republicans who were in control of the Congress back in 1997. Very significant. We had under Bill Clinton four years of surpluses. People forget that this can be done; it is not impossible, and Erskine was the guy who negotiated it. He’s back at it again, and he wants to
do some of the same kinds of things we did then. It is not impossible, and very important, what they have recognized and what they are working toward is trying to cut spending more than they raise taxes. Some of you may disagree with that; I happen to think it’s the right way to go. [Considering] the spending that it should be, taxes need to come up, but we need some sort of ratio on that. The Cameron government in Britain cut three dollars, in effect three pounds, for every one pound of increase in taxes. I don’t think that’s where we are going to wind up, but I think the Simpson-Bowles commission may well wind up with a two-to-one break on spending and taxes. That would cause significant political tensions and resistance, because it means doing some very bold things and, for a change, sacrificing. All of us are going to
Q&A
DR. JOSEPH FINK, president of Dominican University, moderator: What do you think explains the polarization that exists in Congress today? DAVID GERGEN: Well, we can all have breakfast together. Polarization is not new either. The early days of the republic, if you will remember, were very fierce. Go back to the arguments between Jefferson and Hamilton, in the early days, and the newspapers, The Aurora and the like, and see what they printed about each other. Go out to Springfield to the Lincoln Library. There’s a room there for editorial cartoons from when Lincoln was in public life, and they are vicious, often coming from the political opposition. We would be scandalized by some of the ways they portrayed him. So it’s not entirely new, but it has gotten one hell of a lot worse in our lifetimes. Starting with the Great Depression, but certainly starting with the Second World War and the World War II generation, young men and women served, came of age in the war, and then came back, took their uniforms off and served this country so well. We had seven presidents in a row, John Kennedy through George Bush Sr., who were regarded as World War II presidents. Six of them were in the war itself; one, Jimmy Carter, was in the naval academy and the war ended before he graduated. He went on to serve honorably as a submariner. But that growing-up experience in uniform – those people are serving when they are young and when you serve when you are young, you tend to come back and really care about the country for a lifetime. That’s what happened with the World War II generation, and I think we will look back and say that generation and that period was more of a golden age than we realized at the time. When I got to Washington, for all their differences, people were strong Republicans and strong Democrats, but they thought of themselves as the World War II generation, and they thought of
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be called upon to sacrifice, including all of us in this room, in some fashion. But if it can be done wisely and it can be done with enough boldness, it actually has some real merit. But please understand that it does mean going back and reopening the heath-care bill to cut back on the costs of Medicare; we’ve got to get those costs back under better control. It means revisiting Social Security. It likely means raising the retirement age. It likely means cutting back benefits some. It likely means somewhat higher taxes. It means going into what we call tax expenditures. We all have deductions now for our home mortgages, we get deductions for what our employers pay into health care, we get deductions for charities. We are going to have to visit some of those; those are big spending items. The Defense Department is not going to be immune to
themselves first and foremost as strong Americans. Take Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill. They could fight like hell during the day but at five o’clock at night they could put down their differences and lift up a glass and tell old Irish yarns, laugh and have a good time, so that when Tip reached his 70th birthday, Reagan gave him a birthday party, a luncheon at the White House, invited some of his friends, and Reagan at the end of the lunch had written this little doggerel: “Tip, if I had a ticket to heaven, and you didn’t have one too, I’d give my ticket back, and go to hell with you.” I miss those days. FINK: You [have] mentioned young people being idealistic and moving forward, but are we really a nation willing to sacrifice? We went through the Bush years, when we fought a war without asking anyone to sacrifice but soldiers and their families. GERGEN: I don’t know whether we are willing to sacrifice or not. That’s one of the great questions in play. I do know [that] if we don’t sacrifice, we aren’t going to make it; I just think it’s about that simple. We are either going to have things forced on us that are going to be very inequitable, done in a way that people at the bottom are going to get really hurt; or we are going to do this in a way that is respectful of all groups and we are all going to pay a price. We can’t do this by just making the elite or the affluent the enemy. Yes, all of us who have the privilege of being more affluent in this country, we have to step it up. I think going back to the Clinton tax rates is a no-brainer. The nineties were good years. Going from 35 to 39.5 percent for upper tax rate, why should we be worried about that? But going to 50 percent is a different proposition. You add the state taxes on top of that, you’re talking 60-percent taxes in places like California. You are going to find that the economic consequences of that are quite serious, so we have to do this with sensibility. Even as we have to be enormously compassionate and caring and have to make sure there are economic opportunities and