We’re close to our spending limit on the nation’s credit card. The bank bailout, the stimulus package, the Iraq War, and the overall military budget: each is costing over $500 billion. Now the Obama administration is looking at two more hefty charges: a national health care plan and a surge in Afghanistan. It’s time to make a decision. We can’t do both guns and gurneys. After all, we’re looking at a $1.6 trillion government deficit for 2009.
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Lyndon Johnson famously believed that he could have both guns and butter. “We are a country which was built by pioneers who had a rifle in one hand and an ax in the other,” he proclaimed. “We can do both. And as long as I am president we will do both.” His hubris was not unprecedented. The other great liberal reformers of the 20th century, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, also tried to balance their ambitious domestic programs with military engagements overseas.
Johnson’s Great Society programs, which he pushed through in his first two years of office with the help of large Democratic majorities in Congress, were ground-breaking: Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, Vista, landmark civil-rights legislation. Johnson was not initially determined to push guns as well as butter. As a candidate in 1964, Johnson argued that “we don’t want to get involved in a nation with 700 million people (China) and get tied down in a land war in Asia.”
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If not for Vietnam, the American economy would have continued at a brisk pace, and Johnson would have probably been re-elected in 1968. He not only could have continued the Great Society programs but expanded them as well. Instead, his larger ambitions for domestic reform fizzled, and we’ve been living with the Considerably-Less-Than-Great Society of his Democratic and Republican successors ever since.
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... For the health of the country — and the health of his political career — Barack Obama has to reduce the amount of money we’re spending on guns and refocus the national conversation on gurneys instead.
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