In researching attributions for some of the quotes from my collection, in order to post them, I came across this one. It's by John W. Gardner, who was head of the Carnegie Corporation, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under LBJ at the height of the "Great Society" programs, and later founded Common Cause. It dates from 1970, but the words were prescient and reflect what our society has come to after more than a quarter century of dominance by conservative politics.
Tax reduction has an almost irresistible appeal to the politician, and it is no doubt also gratifying to the citizen. It means more dollars in his pocket, dollars that he can spend if inflation doesn't consume them first. But dollars in his pocket won't buy him clean streets or an adequate police force or good schools or clear air and water. Handing money back to the private sector in tax cuts and starving the public sector is a formula for producing richer and richer consumers in filthier and filthier communities. If we stick to that formula we shall end up in affluent misery.
John W. Gardner The Recovery of Confidence (1970) [RQ]
What Gardner (whose quotes I've come across are consistently perceptive and incisive) missed is that the amount of money "returned" has become so large, and the gap between the haves and have-nots so great, that the affluent have basically attempted to invent their own communities, in the form of gated and secured private enclaves of various kinds, with their own police forces and schools and other social amenities.
Unfortunately for them, it's not actually possible to totally secede in this way, and the unsolved problems of the physical and social world continue to harass and hassle the rich and powerful wherever they are. It turns out that we are all in this together, after all.
P.S. The title of this entry comes from a remark Gardner was quoted as making in the New York Times (10/9/1969):
We get richer and richer in filthier and filtheir communities until we reach a final state of affluent misery—crocus on a garbage heap. [SCQ]
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unfutz: toiling in almost complete obscurity for almost 1500 days
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