North Lawe Street and the Decline of the United States

A Symbol of the Decline of United States

The pavement on North Lawe Street in my hometown of Appleton, Wisconsin, has become a poignant symbol of the decline of the United States. Last summer, there was work on the street that involved digging a number of holes, and when the work was finished, the holes were filled and the pavement patched. The patching was done in a slapdash manner, and the street now resembles a street in a very poor, third-world country. North Lawe Street is not the only road in our country that has deteriorated. If you travel much by car and have driven in other countries, you know that the state of the pavement on our interstate highways is significantly worse that the pavement on similar roads in Europe or Asia.

The Result of Focusing Exclusively on Lowering Taxes

Twenty years ago, my city would never have tolerated a street so badly paved, but recently, its people – like people all over the United States – have come to accept as inevitable the decay of our streets and indeed of all of our public services. We have abandoned the idea of decently maintained public services in the name of lower taxes. We have focused so intently on minimizing our tax burden that we have allowed the shared facilities on which we all depend to decay.

Our willingness to allow our shared facilities to decay is a symptom of the fact that in the name of low taxes, we have given up our commitment to the well-being of our communities and of our country. Now, our country is in decline, not because it lacks resources or skills, but because we do not see that the welfare of each of us is bound up with the welfare of our communities and country. We have come to believe that the prosperity of our country is no more than the sum of the private prosperity of each of its citizens.

A Campaign by Anti-Tax Radicals

This has not come about accidentally. It is a result of a campaign to lower the taxes we pay that has been funded by anti-tax radicals and pursued over several decades. The campaign has relied on pitting the interest of each individual against the interest of the community. We have been told that the taxes we pay are nothing but a loss to us. They buy us few or no benefits. We are aso encouraged to think of public services as consumer goods, which means that we should pay only for services that we use directly.

Thus, for example a person who has no children is encouraged to think that it is unjust for him/her to have to pay for our public schools. We are persuaded to ignore the fact that as members of a community we benefit from having an educated work force and an educated electorate. Similarly, people who already have health insurance are encouraged to believe that they would not benefit from a national health care system, and as a result, the United States is the only country in the world where people can go bankrupt because they are sick.

We Have Lost Our Understanding of the Value of Community

We no longer understand that our welfare is bound up with that of our community, and we have lost the feeling of pride in belonging to a community and a nation with first rate public services. We no longer feel a commitment to maintaining them. We vote to lower our taxes because we don’t care what happens to our community. We think that if a decline in the quality of our public services does not affect us directly, it does not affect us at all. That is why we have streets like North Lawe Street that would be regarded as inadequate in a third-world country. In my next post, I will talk about why this has happened and what we can do about it.