'Can America Survive?'
Heated debates about what's right and what's wrong about America are not uncommon, especially during a presidential election year.
But author Ben Stein believes that America is under attack by those who hate America. He writes about the problem in his new book, "Can America Survive?"
Stein believes that the political "left" is misrepresenting the real America, and that is damaging to everyone.
He tells The Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith, "I'm a conservative because America has much that's worth preserving and conserving. This is the best country that has ever been. God truly shed His grace on thee. When I see outspoken left-wing liberals saying it's a racist country, it's a repressive country, it's a fascist country, it makes me furious. This is a wonderful, God-blessed country with the nicest people in the world."
He considers Al Gore the "no. 1 scare-monger in the United States, I'd say, in terms of political position" and puts in this "dangerous" category Robert Altman and Susan Sarandon.
He notes, "I've worked in Hollywood now for 28 years. I've never seen so many rich people who are so incredibly angry. They think they're stars. People say to me, 'How come all the stars are on the left?' The stars aren't on the left. The real stars are patrolling the alleys in Fallujah and Ramadi, fighting in Afghanistan. Those are the real stars. We should focus on those stars, be incredibly grateful for those stars and, by the way, pay them a lot more money."
Stein says this left-wing negativity is not good for our nation. He explains, "There are some people who say America is a racist country and encourage...racial division in the country are very dangerous. Some of these people who say this is a capitalist exploiting class country are dangerous. This is an open, free country with opportunity for everyone, full of kind and nice people. That's what we're fighting for. We're not fighting for a fascist country."
Asked about poverty in America, a topic he discusses at length in his book, he says, "There are 280 million people in this country. There's no doubt that several million of them are very, very poor. And that's very bad. Any poor, any involuntarily poor, is too many.
"The real point is," he continues, "that there is something like 260 million who are not poor and who are prosperous, and that's never happened before, to have as many prosperous people as this country... Let's...say this country has been a hugely successful country. Let's not trash it all the time. Of course, let's work on getting the poor out of poverty. Mainly, they don't stay in poverty very long.
"Let's concentrate on saying we're fighting for the best country in the world. We're the good guys. Stop trashing us. Worry about the enemy. The enemy isn't George Bush. The enemy is the al Qaeda."
Read an excerpt from Chapter One:
Can America Survive: The Rage of the Left, The Truth, and What to Do About it
The U.S. Economy
"Today, under George W. Bush, there are two Americas, not one: One America that does the work, another America that reaps the reward. One America that pays the taxes, another America that gets the tax breaks. One America that will do anything to leave its children a better life, another America that never has to do a thing because its children are already set for life. One America—middle-class America—whose needs Washington has long forgotten, another America—narrow-interest America—whose every wish is Washington's command. One America that is struggling to get by, another America that can buy anything it wants, even a Congress and a President."
— Senator John Edwards ("The Breck Girl"—D.-N.C.)
"George Bush's failed economic plan gave us another year of lower incomes and higher poverty rates—as if we needed more evidence that the Bush administration's economic policies have failed Americans. For two and a half years, George Bush sat on his hands while hard-working middle-class Americans suffer through job loss, reduced wages, and increased
costs for health care and college. Middle-class families are hurting and need relief."
— Senator John Kerry ( D-Mass.)
"Today the large organization is lord and master, and most of its employees have been desensitized much as were the medieval peasants who never knew they were serfs."
— Ralph Nader ( whom we actually like in some ways....)
"Each year an estimated 30 million Americans go hungry."
— Cynthia Bowers, CBS Evening News, July 10, 2003
"The Agriculture Department figures one out of six children in America
faces hunger; that's more than 12 million kids."
— Scott Pelley, 60 Minutes II, January 8, 2003
According to the media, the U.S. economy is a cold-hearted machine that enriches the few and exploits the many. Turn on the TV news, and every economic event becomes the subject for a Marxist critique on the dysfunctional state of capitalism in America. The rich, true to form, keep getting richer, while the poor suffer in Dickensian destitution. Thanks to free trade, factories are closing, and our good jobs are being shipped abroad, consigning the workers left behind to low-wage service jobs—if they can find jobs at all. The middle class is disintegrating, and now Mom and Dad must both labor to bring in what Dad alone could earn a generation ago. For the poor, homelessness is rampant; and the quality of life for all Americans is in irreversible decline. Very likely, all this is the fault of the failed policies of George W. Bush and his Republican henchmen.
Sure, this sounds familiar, but is it even remotely true? Let's examine the facts in this chapter.
Poverty in America
Any poverty in a country as rich as the U.S. is deeply unfortunate. But how bad is it really in America today? A little digging beneath the liberal news machinery is instructive. So is a little history.
In 1937, Franklin Roosevelt could look out to see "one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished." Our image of the poor in America stems from the haunting photographs from that era: people who don't have enough to eat, who wear rags, and who live in squalor, their faces pinched with desperation. But does this accurately depict the condition of the poor in this country today? Hardly. Consider the following, as applied to the 35 million people in America classified as living in poverty by the Census Bureau in 2003:
Here is our first clue that something has gone very wrong with the statisticians in Washington. In other countries, the primary health problem of the poor is malnutrition; in America, it's obesity. Twenty-six percent of those living below the poverty line are obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Never before have so many people who can't afford enough to eat been so overweight. Our underprivileged children today are supernourished, which is why, astonishingly, they grow up to be an inch taller and ten pounds heavier than the average kid did 50 years ago. According to the Department of Agriculture, 97 percent of the U.S. population lives in families that reported they had "enough food to eat" during 2002. Still, half of one percent said that they "often" didn't have enough to eat due to lack of funds. This is heartbreaking and needs to be addressed, but it's almost certainly the smallest percentage of people in such dire straits in any large nation in history. That's the news flash, not the "Two Americas" of Senator Edwards's imagination.
The American Enterprise Institute's Michael Novak grew up in a poor family, where he often had to wear hand-me-down tennis shoes with holes in them. When he visits poor neighborhoods today, he notices what people are wearing on their feet as a telltale indicator of how they're doing economically. What does he see? People wearing $200 athletic shoes. To be sure, we don't allege that all poor people wear expensive shoes, or that even if they did, that would mean they're undeserving of help. But the fact is (thanks largely to free trade), in the last 40 years the price of clothing in America has fallen in half as a percentage of family budgets. This means that, except for the most abject homeless people, shabby or even unfashionable clothing is rare indeed these days.
Fully 46 percent of households classified as "poor" own their own homes, which have three bedrooms, one and a half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio on average. According to Robert Rector and Kirk Johnson's 2004 Heritage Foundation Report, "Understanding Poverty In America," these domiciles have more square footage available per person than does the typical (that is, non-poor) resident of London or Paris.
Poor Americans receive free medical care thanks to Medicaid. Far from being a bare-bones policy, Medicaid covers such procedures as biofeedback, impotence treatment, sex-change operations, computerized tomography, and even obesity treatment. A glance at a recent "Medicaid Coverage—What's New" Webpage reveals that they're planning to add the following treatments: magnetic resonance spectroscopy for brain tumors, radioimmunotherapy for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, oxaliplatin and irinotecan for colorectal cancer, ocular photodynamic therapy with verteporfin for macular degeneration, and FDG Positron Emission Tomography and other neuroimaging devices for suspected dementia. Were these treatments available even to billionaires 25 years ago?
Free elementary and high school education is, of course, provided throughout the U.S. But students from poor backgrounds who want to continue on to college can apply for some $3.5 billion in need-based scholarships that were given away by state universities in 2000 to 2001, to take the figures from the latest year for which they were available. Looking at all types of scholarships from both public and private schools, these totaled over $13 billion in 1995 to 1996 (the last year figures were available). Clearly, the tools for self-improvement are there for anyone who wants to make use of them.
While the condition of people living in poverty today is undoubtedly far from ideal, poverty isn't what it used to be. It's nothing like Depression-era poverty or even the poverty of the 1960s, when so many baby boomers developed their social consciences. And there's now a substantial question about just how bad poverty was, except in some concentrated areas, in the '60s.
The following excerpt s taken from the new book Can America Survive: The Rage of the Left, The Truth, and What to Do About it," by Ben Stein and Phil DeMuth. It is published by New Beginnings Press, am imprint of Hay House. 2004.