The American Dream

Floor Speech

Mr. GRASSLEY. I wish to ask my colleagues as well as myself to think about how many times we have made pessimistic-sounding statements about America's future. I want to remind my colleagues and myself about what I see as excessive pessimism about our great country, because as public figures often what we say maybe has consequences--sometimes positive, sometimes negative. Our attitudes matter and the policies shaped by those attitudes can have an enormous impact for better or for worse on the lives of Americans.

President Ronald Reagan often expressed that America's best days were yet to come. Twenty-five years later I still believe in Reagan's optimism for America. In fact, President Reagan even ended his final letter to the American people: ``I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.'' His agenda reflected that optimism and his policies worked towards a freer, more prosperous America.

But it seems such optimism about America's future might be out of fashion these days. Instead of searching for a silver lining, many pundits and politicians see nothing but clouds. For instance, after decades of hearing about how we are about to run out of fossil fuel, making energy in the future much more expensive and scarce, improved technologies have unleashed enormous reserves of natural gas. This increase in supply has driven down costs and caused electrical generation to switch from coal to natural gas. That in turn has led to substantial reductions in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. That seems to be a silver lining.

Now there are clouds on the horizon. However, rather than to celebrate the fact that the free market is achieving one of their long-held goals, many environmentalists want to ban the technology that led to the shale gas revolution based on unscientific claims of potential groundwater contamination. It seems that it would be a terrible shame to let all of that planning for scarcity of energy to go to waste. So I guess we better not take advantage of this Nation's resources.

On another matter, we hear a lot of hand-wringing about the decline in manufacturing jobs, but this is partly due to advances in manufacturing process which seems to require fewer more-skilled and therefore higher-paying jobs. The growth in American advanced manufacturing will require job training to fill those higher-skilled, higher-paying jobs, and of course we have community colleges throughout our country that are rising to that challenge. This is an opportunity to do insource jobs that might otherwise be done overseas. That is good news for American economic competitiveness and from the standpoint of wanting higher paying jobs for Americans. That seems to me to be a silver lining.

Now the clouds: The decliners are so heavily invested in the story of the decline of American manufacturing that it is easier to bemoan the lack of economically inefficient low-skilled jobs which are the hallmark not of Americans but of underdeveloped countries.

On another matter, the bursting of the economic bubble has forced Americans to spend less and as a result to save more. ``Spend less, save more'' seems to me to be good news. Now clouds are forming because we have economic pundits saying that ``spend less, save more'' shows a lack of consumer confidence. You could look at it as a reality check in the face of unsustainable credit card debt financing spending or is it our national goal to get people to go back to saving less in the future and spending more today? Live for today and forget about tomorrow. You would think so, based upon what you hear in the news shows.

American entrepreneurs still produce a disproportionate share of the world's major innovations. Still, we are cautioned by people who always see clouds hanging over America, that America is not graduating enough people with science and technology degrees and the best and brightest in developing countries may soon decide to stay at home to build their companies instead of coming to America.

Doomsayers have existed throughout our history. It seems to be a sign of sophistication and intellectual refinement to predict the inevitable decline of your own society.

Using 20/20 hindsight, the eventual decline of all of history's great civilizations somehow seems to be inevitable. So isn't it logical then to think our great Nation will decline as well? Perhaps the so-called great recession is a sign that America's best days are in fact already behind us. Many people in the media and government seem so caught up in this narrative they

cannot see any other possibility but our decline. This fever is starting to spread to the general public as polls show a record number of Americans who think the next generation will be less well off than this generation. As a result there is a tremendous amount of energy being devoted to figuring out how to manage America's decline. This is kind of a historical determinism and pessimism that is very alien to the American character.

The rise of America as the most prosperous Nation on Earth was hardly inevitable 200 years ago. We owe our current level of prosperity to the entrepreneurial spirit and hard work of our forefathers and, yes, to their unbounded optimism in the future of this great country. An excessive focus, then, on managing decline risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

For instance, there is a lot of concern about the decline of the middle class, but instead of talking about how to unharness the entrepreneurial spirit that made America an economic super power and grew the great American middle class that we know, all the ideas from our friends across the aisle seem to focus on expanding dependency on government and more government programs. While a succession of new EPA regulations rain down on businesses causing them to pull back from expanding and hiring more people, the Democrats' solution is to keep people on unemployment benefits for a long, long time. Expensive health care reform mandates threaten to force small businesses to reduce the hours of employment and maybe not even hire more than 49 people, because when you get to 50 people there are other requirements in health care reform that kick in.

So what is the answer? Many people in this body would mandate that small business pay a much higher minimum wage. Minimum wage jobs ought to be seen as a stepping stone for low-skilled workers to begin climbing the economic ladder. However, when the economic engine stalls, the ladder of opportunity becomes harder to climb. It happens that more and more people get stuck trying to make ends meet with low wage jobs and no opportunity to get ahead. And it seems that people are concerned about tackling this problem by putting more people on food stamps.

So you get back to the American dream. The American dream is about an opportunity to work hard and earn your own success in life. Proposals to expand the welfare state to the middle class assume the American dream is somehow dead and the best we can hope for is anemic economic growth with high levels of government dependency. That is a defeatist attitude that reflects a distinct lack of faith in our great country. This is the old European model, which the experience of Greece showed to be unsustainable.

In fact, the poster child for an expensive European welfare state, Sweden, has in fact taken a new route to cut taxes and reform entitlement programs--a lesson that we ought to be looking at in America. But who would ever think that we would look to Sweden as an example to teach us how to lower taxes and reform entitlement programs? If we keep planning for decline, we will get it. But if we recover our faith in America's potential and redirect our energy towards removing barriers to economic growth and opportunity, America's best days are still ahead of us.

That leads me to repeat what Ronald Reagan said 25 years ago in that letter to the American people: ``America's best days are still ahead of her.''

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