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| Tanner reviews last decade |
By: John Brannon Messenger Staff Reporter
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Posted: Monday, August 31, 2009 8:36 pm
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By JOHN BRANNON
Messenger Staff Reporter
Sign of the times in America: High anxiety.
“Everywhere you travel, you see it. It is sincere, it is real and it has to do, I think, with some of the events that happened to us as a people in this decade,” Congressman John Tanner said Friday.
Tanner was guest speaker at a weekly luncheon of the Union City Rotary Club at Hampton Centré. He was warmly welcomed as both a native son of Union City and as a member of the club.
“What I want to do today is review where we are,” he told Rotarians. “I’ve traveled from Clarksville to Memphis and just about everywhere in between talking to providers of health care.”
Some of the major events that had a bearing on “where we are today” date back to 2000 when the congressional budget office forecast a $5 trillion surplus over the next 10 years, Tanner said.
“I remember thinking to myself, ‘I don’t know what the price of soybeans is going to be in 10 days. How in the world can anybody say what the economy of the United States is going to be in 10 years?’” he said. “There was a euphoria, ‘We’re filthy rich.’ That was the mindset. Many of us said, ‘Wait a minute. There’s no money here.’ It was just a forecast. We (as a nation) were just barely breaking even. In the Gross Domestic Product, 19 percent on the expenditure side, 19 percent on the revenue side.”
In June 2001, he said, the government embarked on a new economic plan based on assumptions there would be a $5 trillion surplus in the next 10 years. But in September 2001 the bottom fell out — the 9-11 terrorist attacks.
“Every assumption that went into that conclusion (new economic plan) was no longer valid. But we never went back to readjust what we had done,” he said.
By the year 2003, we were at war in Iraq. Gross domestic product-wise, expenditures were over 20 percent, revenues were down to 16.1 percent. “We started borrowing to cover the gap,” Tanner said.
Part of the national anxiety was caused by 9-11, he said. Prior to that, America knew it had the best military in the history of the world, “yet we were still vulnerable to attack in New York and Washington.”
“Today we are engaged against a nameless, faceless enemy in a seemingly endless war that is taxing our treasury and the blood of our young people,” he said. “This has got to give us some cause for anxiety.”
Other factors influencing the national mood were the meltdown of the housing market. “In 2006 there were all these (bad) mortgages. In early 2008, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke showed up on Capitol Hill and said, ‘If Congress doesn’t act, and act quickly, the whole financial system in this country is going to collapse, and millions of people are going to lose everything they’ve accumulated over their lifetimes. Very, very scary.
“So last October, TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) was enacted. Then you had a guy like Bernie Madoff, who ran a $50 billion scam in the very shadows of the Securities & Exchange. People now are beginning to think, ‘What’s happening? Who’s watching the store? What’s happening with the money?’
“We’ve got a new administration. There is a lot of uncertainty. The administration proposes a stimulus package. This (Obama) administration, like all the others I’ve seen come to town, in their haste to capitalize on their November victory in the election, wants to do everything in six months.
“So they take on climate change. Then they want to take on health care.
“So you’ve got all these things building. We are already in a time of peril with respect to where we are financially. And people are just generally afraid of what’s going to happen in the future.
“One of the things we tried to do is say, ‘We’ve got to step back, at least on health care, and not enact anything right now until we’ve had a chance to see what we can keep, what works pretty good and what we can fix.
“We have the best health care system in the entire world for acute care. If you’re really sick, this is the best place in the world to be sick. We don’t do so well in terms of prevention and maintenance.
“What I’ve been trying to do recently is go around, talking to providers, and say, ‘What can we do incrementally?’ I’ve found in my 20 years, any change in public policy, in order to be successful, has to have a critical mass of public support. It doesn’t have to have an overwhelming 85 percent, but it’s got to have enough consensus to garner a critical mass of public support for it to be successful.”
Published in The Messenger 8.31.09 |
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