Fiscal sanity, ctd.

And the New York Times (paywall) jumps on the Slate bandwagon! David Leonhardt, writing under the headline "Do-Nothing Congress as a Cure", lays out the case that the single most important thing that Congress could do would be to let the Bush tax cuts expire in 2012. He makes a good point that others have made before:

In reality, finding a way to raise taxes may well be the central political problem facing the United States.
As countries become richer, their citizens tend to want more public services, be it a strong military or a decent safety net in retirement. This country is no exception. Yet our political culture is an exception. It has made most tax increases, even to pay for benefits people want, unthinkable.

A lot of that is the usual corporate interests throwing their weight around, or opportunistic Republicans who aren't interested in policy so much as political cudgels. But, as Leonhard points out, the tax question is tied up fundamentally in the question of the welfare state - you raise taxes to pay for certain entitlement programs. And this hits up against what I think is a fundamental American meanness - meanness in both senses of the word, both a callous cruelty and a cheapness that I think are really at the heart of American culture.

We like to think of American meritocracy as unequivocally a good thing, but the nasty underside of it is that anyone who has not succeeded becomes perceived as not deserving of success. A lot of people I've talked to in this country really, honestly believe that the poor are poor because they don't try hard enough to succeed and aren't making the most of opportunities they have. Americans have really drunk the Kool-Aid on meritocracy and it leads to a "look out for No. 1" mentality, that says that not only pursuit of your own self-interest but also undermining others is the only way to be successful, with "successful" defined rather narrowly as "rich". And if you believe that, why would you ever want to do anything except take as much money as you possibly can for yourself, and make sure that everyone else gets as little as possible?