The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity by Jeffrey D. Sachs

in the past thirty years that reflect a fidelity to vested interests. These are low marginal tax rates for the rich, as sponsored by campaign contributors; the contracting of public services to well-connected private interests; the neglect of the budget deficit when voting on tax and spending issues, leaving the debt to future generations; the favoring of large military outlays, even as domestic spending is squeezed; and the lack of serious long-term budget planning. These five policy biases have been maintained through the thick and thin of presidents since Reagan.
    The famous “triangulation” of Obama and Clinton with conservative positions is designed less to win centrist voters than to fillcampaign coffers with corporate funds. Corporatocracy, the over-representation of corporate and wealthy interests, is the essential feature of the duopoly. Campaign financing and lobbying are the key elements that keep the system intact.
    The compromises made with the rich are consistently out of line with public opinion. The public desires to tax the rich more heavily, cut military spending, and develop renewable energy alternatives to oil. The outcome instead is tax cuts for the rich, unchecked military spending, and a continued stagnation in alternatives to oil, gas, and coal.
    Both parties have consistently downplayed the importance of budget balance in favor of other political objectives. Reagan’s supply-side advisers argued that tax cuts would spur enough growth to pay for themselves. Obama’s stimulus supporters have argued something analogous: that deficits in the midst of a downturn have little or no longer-run cost, and even that deficit cutting in a recession is not feasible. These are both magical arguments without any empirical support but lots of ideological fervor. More important, they are arguments of convenience, allowing each party to favor its constituencies with short-term benefits (more tax cuts or spending increases) while downplaying the buildup of debt that will inevitably ensue. There have been only two short-lived exceptions to the chronic neglect of budget deficits. The first was George H. W. Bush, who broke his 1988 campaign pledge of “no new taxes” in order to reduce the budget deficit in 1990. The second was Bill Clinton, who pushed a modest hike in the top income tax rate (from 31 to 39.6 percent) and agreed to Republican-led budget cuts that helped move the budget to a temporary surplus at the end of the 1990s, albeit one that was quickly reversed under George W. Bush.
    The duopoly also applies to foreign policy. Both parties view the Middle East and its greater neighborhood (stretching from the Horn of Africa and Yemen in the west to Afghanistan in the east) as the core theater of U.S. foreign policy, with the primary concern the continued flow of Middle East oil to the world economy. Carterenunciated a military doctrine that any threat to the flow of Middle East oil would be viewed as a security threat to the United States. There have been marginal differences in military proclivities between the two parties, with Bush Jr. being the most trigger-happy of recent presidents, but the differences should not be exaggerated. Obama not only retained Bush’s secretary of defense but also expanded the war in Afghanistan while drawing down troops in Iraq. As the author and former army colonel Andrew Bacevich makes clear, the core U.S. military doctrine—based on the global projection of force—has remained constant on a bipartisan basis for more than forty years. 9
    The final feature of the two-party duopoly during the past three decades has been the willful neglect of longer-term thinking in government. The only place where even a modicum of long-term budgeting takes place is the Congressional Budget Office, which provides a nonpartisan budget “score” of legislative proposals, usually on a ten-year time horizon, though occasionally longer. But this budget score is a far cry from systematic