Dear Roger

Dear Roger

I have always been a fan of the name Roger and even named my oldest son Roger. The Roger I am addressing this to is a motorcycle friend of mine who is about as different from me as he could be. He is small and slender, but mostly he leans in the exact opposite direction that I do on almost every topic. Roger and I (along with Kevin) text almost every day about something, usually jabbing each other over politics and economics. I have a more academic approach to both and Roger has a pragmatic approach. Kevin falls somewhere in between us, I suspect for reasons having to do with spousal influence. You see, Roger’s wife is as far right as Roger is. Kim is as far left as I am. In Kevin’s case, his right leaning is moderated by his wife being more left leaning. We recently had an exchange that I think is noteworthy. Here is what Roger said in response to my praise for Joe Biden’s performance during the State of the Union Address (I actually cut and pasted a piece by noted historian Heather Cox Richardson): “I guess Kevin has gone to the other side because he doesn’t like Trump. Too bad. We would be better off as a nation to not have either one of them. I really believe that someday in the future we will regret what Biden is doing. I guess the country will be happy when we can give everything to everyone with no consequences. I feel bad for my grandchildren. Both parties can’t help themselves from giving money away that we don’t have. If we continue to over regulate and have a war on business we will never be able to grow our way out of this mess.” This is my reply:

Dear Roger.

I know you and I both care deeply about our grandchildren, but we clearly worry about very different aspects of our future as a nation when it comes to what they are likely to face based on our actions today. I want to try to delineate our respective views to explain why I so strongly disagree with your point of view.

1. You like Trump and his policies and I disagree with almost everything he stands for. You liked his policies and I feel his character was so lacking that it negated his presidency from the get-go.

2. You are a believer in trickle-down supply-side economics and I am not. Economic research has definitively proven that over the past forty years, that economic theory has simply not worked. It has vastly increased wealth disparity and has only served the wealthy and not the overall growth of the economy. On the other hand, the fiscal policy approach of the Biden Administration, pursued aggressively due to COVID and Ukraine, follows the highly successful paths of the liberal democracy policies of the FDR Administration, which has empirically proven that it expanded economic activity, created a broadening of our middle class and strengthened out democracy.

3. You say we “give away money” and I say we tax progressively based on those who benefit the most from our infrastructure and globally strong and stable democratic platform. We only lack funds and build deficits because Republicans dramatically and irresponsibly cut taxes for large corporations and the wealthy. Studies prove that more of the recent rise in the deficit and national debt is a result of that tax cutting more than it is about increased spending. Tax cuts go into rich people’s pockets to do sometimes stupid things like buying Twitter for $44B. Fiscal spending build the economy through the well-established multiplier effect and builds a stronger consumer base of people who are more invested in our system rather than alienated from it.

4. You dislike our immigration policies and I do too, but you seem to want more constraints to allow less refugees and less asylum-seekers. I, on the other hand, believe that immigration is our nation’s lifeblood and that it may be our biggest strength for two reasons. First and foremost, we need population growth that doesn’t add to the world population and a more open-door immigration policy will do that. I want control but much more dedicated resources to allow relocation of these people to places and for industries where they can gain a foothold and we can get much needed labor supply. The other aspect of immigration that cannot be lost is the diversity it brings to our national melting pot, which only gets better the more inclusive it becomes.

5. You are strongly anti-regulation, but the truth is that you are only anti-regulation about regulation that you don’t like. Regulation is a critical component of any free market economy because without it, the human nature for greed and recklessness tends to prevail and hurt everyone. Regulation is a challenging balancing point and is hard to get right, but must be used to keep a democratic capitalistic economy on an even keel.

6. On the topic of globalization, I’m not sure where you specifically stand, but Republicans as a group are largely nationalistic and isolationistic. This approach is both outdated and unrealistic in a highly connected world. In the same way that you cannot build walls to effectively keep out immigrants, you cannot build walls to keep out the rest of the world from our economy. In fact, our economy suffers greatly from such blanket xenophobia. That does not mean that we knuckle under to strong arm tactics from our competitor countries like China, but rather that we use that fiscal policies like the CHIPS bill to fight our fight and not the idiotic cudgel of tariffs like Trump used.

7. Civility is a very big deal these days and may seem minor, but I believe it is at the core of our problems. The Republican extremists have been allowed to run rampant over the House of Representatives and no amount of control by McCarthy’s speakership seems possible any more. The lack of civility and norms shown during the State of the Union Address was unprecedented. The allowance of people of known ill-repute like George Santos to keep their seats in Congress and forgoing censure by Republicans just makes our country weaker both in character and especially in the eyes of our allies. In your theme of the importance of consequences, I suggest that the consequences of pursuing untruths for political gain should be at the top of things that we collectively fight to end.

8. Biden has strengthened and reestablished our global leadership role. Trump worked incessantly to destroy it. Biden has brought us closer to our most important allies and kept our enemies (China, Russia, Iran, North Korea) at bay. Trump embraced all of those enemies and shunned our historic and important allies.

9. You seem to want us to collectively ignore the parts and peoples of the world that would qualify as the have nots. You say we are “giv(ing) everything to everyone with no consequences”. I say that we have an obligation as humans to care for one another and that may be the most important legacy we can leave our grandchildren because it will create a more stable and truly better world with less hate and more acceptance. It is worth twice the price to keep our world from the brink of anarchy by giving everybody something to lose by having a true stake in the system. It requires a longer-term and more expansive view of the world, which is the only rational approach to planning.

10. I agree that we, as a world, are in a mess, but that it is a mess of our own making. The biggest mess may be to our environment and that will affect our grandchildren more than anything else. Whether we caused it or its part of the natural cycle is irrelevant. What matters is how we fix it. You want to continue a proven harmful path of hydrocarbon overuse. I want to see us bend over backwards, even to some immediate cost to us economically, to find a less invasive way to generate energy for our needs without destroying the environment as quickly as we seem to be doing today.

Dear Roger, I doubt that this will cause an epiphany in you and that you will suddenly recant all of your views. What I do hope is that one or two of these points might resonate with you and make you think twice before knee-jerking to the latest republican or Fox News trope.