The "Afford" Word

There’s a dirty word just starting to gain currency in government circles. It’s a word that neither citizens nor national legislators nor bureaucrats have used in polite Washington company for over a century. During my lifetime most people haven’t even thought of it, certainly not in regard to national policy.
It’s the word “afford”. In my life time, money has been the last consideration on anyone’s mind when we decided to do something as a nation. Go to the moon? Reallocate here. Bail out the Savings and Loans? Print some more money there. Build coast to coast highways under the National Highway Act of 1922? Just do it. Create a PWA or WPA or CCC to fight the Depression? Order it done.
Money was never an issue. We fought World Wars One and Two on the cuff, with the help of school children bringing in their dimes and pennies to buy War Bonds. During the Cold War, if national security demanded a new fleet of bombers or a grid of super highways, we simply built them.
About forty years ago, someone went to the Speaker of the House (where all “money bills” originate) and asked him if he had any idea of the cost of such and such a program. The man looked blank. The writer noted that the question of money had never come up in the Speaker’s mind while discussing policy. It didn’t have to.
I remember when I was quite young reflecting on this phenomenon. Did anyone in America realize, I wondered, that there were whole nations where thousands of children died very young because they COULD NOT AFFORD medicine, staff and hospitals to care for them? Let alone adequate food.
(Or that many war torn nations could never have afforded to keep troops in the field if we or the Russians didn’t supply the munitions?) The word “afford” has been a major consideration in matters of life, death, nutrition, health, national defense and infrastructure in nearly every other nation except the United States throughout human history.
We have no idea how blessed we’ve been in this past Twentieth Century. Even in the Depression, the word never had to come up. What’s all the wrangling about deficits and “big government” you may want to ask. Smoke and mirrors. One side wanted to give money to this stratum of society and felt it immoral waste to give it to another stratum; the other saw it in reverse.
There was never a serious question of just plain not having ANY money to spend on anyone.
Now, for the first time in living memory, the issue stares us in the face. (All the Chinese have to do is pull one plug and the issue will smack us hard enough to knock us down!) I really wonder if Mr. Obama realizes how uncharted the waters are that he will start sailing next week.
There are going to come times in his administration when, very likely, on some vital need his minions will have to say to him, “No, Mr. President, we cannot afford that. We’ll just have to let some people die or live in tarpaper shacks like the rest of the world.” Is Obama prepared for that very real possibility? Is anybody? That really is how much of the world lives.
The last time such an issue arose, J.P. Morgan stepped in and bailed out the government. There’s no one big enough to do that now. Happily, we haven’t needed another one since that day. No wonder the word “afford” never comes up. No wonder it’s such a dirty word.
An example was brought to mind this morning. I was in a large, suburban, consolidated school district office. We were talking about how, fifty years ago, when the little neighborhood schools were all blended into one super high school and middle school the question of future affordability never came up.
Here, suddenly, was a geographically huge school district totally dependent on vast fleets of gas burning school buses (kids could walk to the little two or four room neighborhood schools they shut down). No one ever asked, “Will we always be able to buy and maintain all these buses? Will we always be able to pay the drivers and put gasoline in them?” Not then, they didn’t.
Believe me it’s an issue today. As is heating and lighting the huge buildings that we’re still paying the bond issues on. Just locally here, where we never asked, “Can we afford?”, where the walls are lined with posters proclaiming, “Nothing is too good for our kids”, the person I spoke to pointed out that this year’s budget is cut to the bone—next year’s will have to be slashed far more—and the year after? The person just rolled her eyes and shuddered.
Pick up a science text book in your high school. Don’t be shocked if it was printed more than (in some cases FAR more than) ten years ago. In some areas of science, that’s nearly antediluvian. Teachers are rarely issued the extra pencils and pens that they were even five years ago. “Nothing is too good for our kids”—if you can afford it.
Or how about the master teacher who truly knows the subject he’s taught for thirty or more years? “Every time I step out of my room,” one told me recently, “the principal is there asking, ‘What can we do to get you to retire?’” The “kid” they’ll replace him with won’t know half as much—but he’ll be cheaper.
Mr. Obama will face something no president in the past hundred years has faced. He may not even know what he’s looking at (would Clinton, either Bush or Ronald Reagan?). But he may have to figure it out fast.
Thenl come the cruel choices.