BY MICHAEL JOHNSON

“I’m scared.”

That was the response of the guest speaker at a luncheon the other day, after I told him his speech was a little scary.  We were riding down the elevator together and by the time the doors opened to the lobby I was convinced he was serious.

                The speaker was Dr. Alan Greenspan, the man who served as chairman of the Federal Reserve for 18 years and is as much admired as he is despised.   Whatever you think of him and his tenure, his remarks were chilling. 

                 Greenspan’s message was that the short-term economic outlook is pretty decent because the stock market is driving the recovery.  The long-term outlook, however, is grim. That’s because eventually U.S. debt is going to consume so much capital that there will too little left for the private sector to borrow.

When the private sector cannot borrow it cannot produce and when it cannot produce, the economy fails.   

       If he is even half right, he has offered Republican Leader John Boehner a definition of Armageddon that is not loaded with hyperbole.

                Greenspan believes the American people, and by extension their representatives, won’t meet this looming crisis.  The debt, he said, is no longer a political problem, it is a cultural one. 

                It is true.  It is beyond politics.  It is cultural.  Americans are deeply invested in the culture of the ‘free lunch’.  That means they neither have the will, nor the political means to raise taxes or cut public spending, nor do they have the creative invention needed to grow economically enough, to reduce or eliminate trillion-dollar a year deficits and a $14 trillion debt, 40 percent of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP).  The people and their politicians are deeply invested, as well, in a paralyzed political process incapable of tackling big problems that require transformational change.

            And this is not a problem.  It is a crisis.

                The proof of this political paralysis is all around us.  The Democrats in the House, with their massive majority, can’t even pass a budget.  The Senate is in a procedural knot, tied tightly by oppressive partisanship on both sides.   

 Congress couldn’t muster the votes to form a deficit commission with the power of the law behind it to just study the problem, let alone solve it.   Appropriations continue to be loaded down with earmarks. Congress continues to tiptoe around, and over, the third rails of fiscal politics– Social Security and the growing number of other entitlements.  Partisan politics, ideological rigidity and parochial interests keep compromise and consensus off the table and out of sight.   The best solutions, those that cross political aisles and span ideologies, are not possible.

              This culture is one of victims and villains, gamesmanship that President Obama has elevated to new heights.   There’s a villain for every ill and if we simply punish the villains and exalt the victims, everything will be fine.  But, we are embedding in our political lifestyle a culture in which it is okay to foment anger, demean one another, create distrust and division, encourage isolation and throw words like ‘racist’ and ‘evil’ and ‘enemy’ and ‘un-American’ at anyone who dares to disagree. And now we can do it behind a cloak of anonymity in newspapers and on blogs.  It is a culture of convenience, avoidance and stridency to which the new infotainment media is addicted.

            In the meantime, the Obama Administration is employing the full power of a  Spielberg imagination coming up with ways to spend more, tax more and regulate more, driving us further into debt and economic stagnation.  

          Dr. Greenspan didn’t have any lasting solutions to offer us.   They’re a little hard to come by.  Who can blame him?

        The rest of us, though, need to come up with answers and contribute something to a process that makes them work.  Our first contribution can be to stop screaming at others and turning off those who scream at us, particularly from a TV screen.  

            House Republicans, in putting together their new commitment to America or whatever it will be called, should include in it a commitment to finding long-term solutions, through long-term planning, through bipartisan deliberation behind closed doors—yes, behind closed doors, where some work can get done.  House Republicans should dedicate a portion of their resources and their talent to chronic problem solving.  They should get younger members who have more time and more to gain and lose in on the act.  They should draw on the resources of people in and out of government willing to dedicate themselves to the task, and do it under rules and procedures that force action at the end, with everything, everything, everything on the table until it is taken off. 

             They should create incubators to test ideas and concepts.  They should call them laboratories in which some of the great questions of our day and tomorrow are analyzed, experimented with and hopefully solved, questions of social integration, economic survival, 21^st century governance, the relevance of the First Amendment for starters.

             Politics can change. So can political culture.

 Editors’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff.   He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.