Sometimes, you hear people say America can no longer afford X, Y or Z because we’re broke. We just don’t have the money.
We are not broke. We are not anywhere near broke. But we may in fact be broken.
Our political system is broken, our national will is broken, our sense of ourselves as a people is broken, our commitment to “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” is broken.
Today, for example, the Highway Trust Fund sits empty, with Congress attempting to find the votes for yet another piecemeal temporary solution. It is empty because the gasoline tax that finances transportation in this country hasn’t been raised in 22 years, and two decades of inflation and population growth have reduced it to a fraction of its buying power.
But Congress cannot bring itself to raise it, a situation people on both the left and right attribute to the impact of President Ronald Reagan. That’s a discredit to the man. The actual Reagan — the man, not the mummified myth — understood the difference between campaign rhetoric and implementing policy, between the poetry of politics and the hard prose of governance.
The actual Reagan raised the gasoline tax in 1982. He not merely raised it, he more than doubled it, from four cents a gallon to nine cents a gallon. He even set aside a penny of that amount and reserved it for mass transit. Atlanta’s MARTA system was financed in part through that special fund.
And Reagan did not take such a step reluctantly. He advocated it and fought for it. “America can’t afford throwaway roads or disposable transit systems,” he said, explaining his position in a 1982 radio address to the country:
“Common sense tells us that it’ll cost a lot less to keep the system we have in good repair than to let it crumble and then have to start all over again. Good tax policy decrees that wherever possible, a fee for a service should be assessed against those who directly benefit from that service. Our highways were built largely with such a user fee — the gasoline tax. I think it makes sense to follow that principle in restoring them to the condition we all want them to be in.”
Common sense, he said. What a quaint concept.
Can you imagine a modern Republican making such a statement? The tea party would howl, Ted Cruz would snort in derision, Grover Norquist would read him out of the conservative movement, and the Club for Growth would recruit somebody to run against him in the primary. And that somebody would probably win.
I write all this as someone who never voted for Reagan, but who also recognizes how those who came after him have distorted and perverted his message. Reagan understood the difference between a political philosophy that guides your choices and a hard, unyielding dogma that dictates those choices and is enforced with a Stalinist ferocity. He also had faith in what we could accomplish together.
Unfortunately, those who claim to be his heirs have taken that man and turned him into a cartoon that does their bidding, a graven image that bears little resemblance to the actual flesh-and-blood human being. This is not his fault, but the fault of those who have corrupted his legacy and are in the process of breaking the country that he loved.
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