A moment or two after Bush’s declaration, however, he returned to form. We will not consider raising payroll taxes to solve the problem, he declared. But without raising taxes, the nation is left with only one side of the equation to tinker with.

Indeed, President Bush’s remarks mentioned only ways to reduce benefits — restricting payments to the wealthy, raising the retirement age, discouraging early retirement. In fact, when you do the arithmetic, unless the president raises taxes somewhat, you find he is going to have to cut your benefits by a lot. He neglected to say that directly. Press reports said his fellow Republican urged him not to.

He also neglected to say clearly that privatization, which will allow workers to divert part of their payroll taxes into private investment accounts run by Wall Street firms, is not going to change that one bit. Not in the first five or six decades, anyway, and depending on the plan, perhaps never. In fact, in the near run, it will only make matters worse. The government will have to borrow a couple of trillion dollars to compensate for the diversion of money into private accounts. There was no mention of how to finance that, which leaves the president with a perfect batting average so far. He has never discussed how he would deal with the transition costs. At least, in the only real bit of news, he said he will not propose implementing the plan until 2009.

Let’s take a step back to understand what the nation’s choices truly are. Because the number of retirees will rise dramatically as baby boomers in coming years reach 65 (the new Social Security retirement age is 66 and rising), payroll taxes paid by those who are working will eventually not be enough to pay the Social Security recipients.

President Bush enjoys saying that as a result Social Security is on the road to bankruptcy. We will run short of our needs by a couple of hundred billion dollars in 2027, for example, he said Wednesday.

To most of us, Social Security bankruptcy conjures up images of dereliction of duty and means the system will simply disappear. “If you’ve got children in their 20s, as some of us do, the idea of Social Security collapsing before they retire does not seem like a small matter,” the president said in measured tones Wednesday night. “And it should not be a small matter to Congress.”

Far from being derelict, Social Security is easily the best run government program in America. And Social Security will neither collapse nor disappear, even if the nation does nothing to reform it. The gap between expected revenues and outlays will come to about 2 percent of the nation’s wages over the next 75 years, or less than 1 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. That means the nation can cover the imbalance with a 2 percentage point increase in payroll taxes, from the current 12.4 percent, now equally shared by employers and employees.

A massive increase in taxes? That is how the president characterizes it.

Even if the nation does not raise taxes, the Social Security Administration projects that the system will still be able to pay 70 percent or so of benefits due. Hardly a collapse.

But there are genuine concerns. For years now, baby boomers and others have been paying more in payroll taxes than has been needed to meet the needs of retirees. The federal government has of course spent the surplus, but it has placed Treasury bonds in a trust fund to be paid off when needed. And needed they may well be around 2018 when, as the president noted, Social Security payments will begin to exceed the payroll taxes collected.

Will the bonds be paid off? Of course they will. The Treasury will not renege on its obligations. But there will also be pressures on the budget, and Democrats are too flippant about this. If the nation is still in deficit, other programs may have to be cut or the Treasury may have to borrow more in the financial markets.

When the trust fund is eventually run down — the Social Security Administration estimates that will happen around 2042, but some think it won’t happen until the 2050s — the system, based on current projections, will surely need new sources of revenues or cuts in benefits paid.

But is privatization the answer to these shortfalls? Unfortunately for President Bush, not according to studies that have already been done by the Social Security Administration, the Congressional Budget Office and independent analysts. There is no reasonable privatization plan that can make Social Security solvent over the next 75 years, if ever, without significant cuts in benefits for typical workers.

The reason that privatization is no panacea, even if stocks pay significantly better returns over time than the present Social Security system does for an average worker, is that it will take too long for these accounts to build into a meaningful nest egg. In fact, diverting Social Security taxes to private accounts will hasten the system’s insolvency.

Second, investing in the financial markets is risky. First, stock and bond markets may not do as well in the future as they did in the past. Given how high stock prices are today, many economists think they probably will not. Second, many individuals will invest poorly and not earn average returns, often by a long shot. Third, just when you retire, the markets may be way down.

The best way to see how privatization would really work is to examine one of the plans outlined in detail in late 2001 by President Bush’s own Commission to Strengthen Social Security, under the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who President Bush mentioned Wednesday night, and Richard D. Parsons, chief executive of Time Warner.

The forthcoming Bush proposal looks as if it will be based on this plan. It would allow individuals to divert up to four percentage points of Social Security taxes (or about one-third of a worker’s total wages paid over to Social Security )into private accounts, as the president said in his speech.

But the gains from private accounts would not nearly balance the Social Security system, the commission found. Large additional cuts in guaranteed benefits were needed. The commission’s plan cut guaranteed benefits by indexing them to price increases rather than wage increases.

Here’s how that works. The current Social Security system replaces a certain amount of a worker’s wages — say, about 40 percent for middle-income workers. As wages rise, so do benefits. But wages in fact rise much faster over time than do prices. Thus, under the commission proposal, benefits linked only to price increases would ultimately be much lower than the present Social Security system would pay.

How much lower? For a typical one-earner family, guaranteed benefits would be about 75 percent of the level promised by the present system in 2042 and, stunningly, only half of the level in 2075. This is the dirty little secret of privatization.

The president seems to think that adding gains due to investment in private accounts will excite younger people. But even if a person earned, say, 4.5 percent a year in a portfolio of stock and bonds over 30 years, and paid a minimal investment management fee to boot, returns for a typical one-earner couple whose breadwinner retires in 2042 will still be less than the benefits promised under the present system.

The eyes may be about to glaze over, I know. But just one last technical point. Many of those who opt for private accounts will not earn 4.5 percent a year. Many and perhaps most will earn just 3 percent a year or so, and even less. Under these circumstances, benefits including those gains from private accounts will actually be lower down the road than if even nothing were done to reform the current system.

Let me say that one more time, because it is a stunner. If the nation makes no reforms, the reduced benefits — down to about 70 percent of promised levels — will still be higher for the typical retiree than benefits will be under the likely Bush administration privatization plan.

The president goes blithely on, however. He may believe more in the certainty of equity market returns than he should. No doubt, ideology also has a part. For all the president’s praise of Social Security Wednesday night, it has always bothered those who favor minimal government.

There are also practical political considerations. The success of Social Security has been a political advantage for the Democrats. Why not take that away from them?

And, of course, it will be a boon for the Street. The president argues that the system will carefully monitor managerial fees. But Austan Goolsbee, an economist at the University of Chicago, computed last fall that even modest fees will accumulate into an enormous amount over 75 years. In fact, the present value of those fees is $940 billion, or about one-fourth of the cumulative gap between Social Security’s income and outgo over those 75 years.

Goolsbee may have overshot the mark some, especially if government picks up some of the administrative expense (which will cost taxpayers, anyway). But there is little doubt the fees will mount, especially if individuals are given some choice in their investments and Wall Street has the incentive to attract them.

Teresa Ghilarducci, an economist from Notre Dame, thinks there is another, even more compelling lure for Wall Street. As baby boomers retire, they will stop buying stocks on balance and start selling them. So the Street needs new sources of purchasing power to hold up stock prices. What better than privatization?

There is a sensible course. On Wednesday, President Bush argued that the nation should fix Social Security once and for all. But there is no forecasting the future that far in advance with certainty. It is entirely possible the economy will do better than expected over the next 50 to 70 years, wages will rise rapidly, and payroll taxes will more than exceed expected Social Security outlays.

Experts like Robert Ball, the former Social Security Administration official, and Alicia Munnell, a former Clinton economist now at Boston College, argue that the nation should begin to make small changes now. Benefits should be somewhat reduced and taxes raised only slightly. In 10 years or so, the nation can make another adjustment, depending on the outlook at that point.

This is not the ideological bold stroke the president is looking for. It will provide no long-term political blow to the Democrats, nor will it delight one’s Wall Street friends. It will probably not make history, either. But it is the best way to solve the nation’s Social Security and generate confidence in the system.

Now the president is off on a tour to sell his Social Security ideas. If he ultimately wins, it will be a tragedy. It will transform Social Security from a guaranteed retirement benefit to a gamble. Not all will lose, but many will. We could do little worse for our children. Fortunately, I think this is one battle the president will lose.

Editor’s note: This story has been corrected since its original publication.

But fairness isn’t the only reason the tax cut was ill-advised. As an economic remedy, it won’t work for three reasons. Most of it won’t kick in until far into the future, too late to help us out of the current slump. It puts the vast majority of the money returned into the hands of the wealthy, even though a tax cut targeted to the poor, working and middle classes makes more sense, since those groups are more likely to stimulate the economy by spending what the government foregoes in taxes. And, of course, the cut portends federal budget deficits as far as the eye can see, which is disturbing investors who often base decisions on prospects in the longer run.

Now, as the economic bad news continues, Bush refuses to acknowledge the threat. While the president focuses on Iraq and terrorism, the lack of national economic leadership is making consumers, businesses and investors nervous. The prospect of war with Iraq is also seriously depressing investor and consumer confidence. Meanwhile, Bush hasn’t introduced any type of economic rescue or stimulus package to Congress. But, so far at least, Bush hasn’t had to address the economic crisis, since he has paid almost no political price for his failure to do so. And for that, the Democrats have only themselves to blame.

The best thing the president has going for him politically, in terms of deflecting attention away from the sagging economy, is the embarrassing timidity of the Democrats. Watching them this year has been like watching a great veteran hitter strike out again and again on a bad pitch: His reflexes may have slowed slightly, and the press keeps telling him that he is past his prime. His coaches keep telling him to shorten his swing. But clearly his real problem is confidence.

The Democrats have been listening too well to both the press and their “coaches” — specifically, the “New Democrat” advisors who have proudly taken a page from the Republicans and Alan Greenspan. The bad pitch they can’t resist is the notion that Americans want tax cuts, at almost any price. Many Democrats now believe that social programs are a perhaps-necessary evil that will always drag the economy down because they drain money from capital spending. And they think it’s political suicide to call for rescinding the long-term Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans: Even a newly energized Al Gore refused to take that stand in a recent speech at the Brookings Institution. Sen. Ted Kennedy has been one of the few prominent Democrats to stand up and demand at least postponement of the cuts, but these days the party considers him too far to the left.

In fact, the big Bush tax cuts hurt the economy, and some types of social spending would help it. Increasing selective social spending would do two important things at once: Help the overall economy and protect American families from the worst impacts of this slowdown. With Republicans and Democrats both steering away from this approach, you’re not hearing about it in many political stump speeches as we approach Nov. 5, but you should.

It’s clear the economy is not going to revive from its torpor any time soon. Gross domestic product, which started falling in the spring of 2001, started to rise modestly this spring, but now looks to be weakening again. The labor market has not revived. The number of jobs in the economy fell substantially for a year, and has now remained about flat. Most telling, the number of employed has fallen as a proportion of the population for well more than two years, the longest such decline in the past 50 years. That means people are leaving the work force in droves, but are no longer counted as unemployed. The rise in the unemployment rate, up 2 points since early last year, actually understates the labor market’s weakness. And foreign economies are weakening, too, providing less demand for the nation’s exports. The trade deficit — the excess of imports over exports — hit another monthly record in August.

The list of negative indicators is long. Stock prices have fallen faster than at any time since the legendary bear market of the early 1970s. Earnings are weak. The deficit keeps rising. Capital investment is not likely to come back. Many of the nation’s economic gains stemmed from the famous rise in productivity — output per hour of work — which had a lot to do with computer technology and investment in that sector. It’s unlikely to continue — recent productivity increases have more to do with aggressive layoffs and staff reductions than long-term strength, but new-economy advocates cling to it as proof that the stage is set for another boom. And it isn’t. Another dip may be more likely than a boom any time soon.

Against this backdrop of economic gloom, it increasingly appears that no one is at home in the Bush administration when it comes to these issues. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill has been tone-deaf to domestic and international economic concerns. He dismissed the Enron scandal as capitalism at work and downplayed what someone in his position could do to make a difference. By contrast, Clinton administration predecessor Robert Rubin — like him or not — played a large role in smoothing over tough financial times, including the Asian financial crisis of 1997. His other economic advisors, hearty laissez-faire advocates who always enjoy a good excuse for government inaction, aren’t taken seriously.

Some energetic Republicans have tried to blame the problem on President Clinton. But if you had to pick a single culprit from the 1990s boom to blame for the current economic sluggishness, it wouldn’t be a Democrat, anyway. The more appropriate candidate is long-time Republican Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, who fanned the speculative bubble with exaggerated claims for the new economy and refused to take any actions, such as raising margin requirements, to dampen trading. Greenspan’s support was also critical in getting the Bush tax cut passed.

That’s not to say President Clinton deserves no blame for the current troubles. His administration did not fight for new regulations to control accounting and finance excesses. In fact, it mostly supported legislation that made conflicts of interest in the financial community more likely. Even in the wake of the disgraceful failure of Long-Term Capital Management, the enormous hedge fund, the administration proposed no new regulations. And under the guidance of Rubin and his successor, Larry Summers, it simplistically promoted liberalizing capital flows around the world, which contributed to various foreign financial crises in 1997 and 1998.

Most significantly, the Clinton administration did not use either the political or economic capital it accumulated during the boom years to argue for greater social investment — which would have served to protect American workers and families from the severity of this latest downturn, as well as protect the resilience of the economy itself. The Democrats under Clinton trumpeted the “unprecedented prosperity” of the late 1990s, even as 40 million people lacked health insurance and America could boast of the highest child-poverty rate in the developed world (though child poverty did decline under Clinton).

Nearly half of American men saw their incomes fall over a 20-year period, even with the improvements of the late 1990s. In addition, many middle-income families lost economic ground thanks to education, drug, and healthcare costs that rose three and four times faster than typical incomes. Much of the household prosperity of the boom years had to do with spouses working in higher numbers and at longer hours, without the benefits of high-quality day care — let alone government-supported day care. And while many women found individual independence through work, even some formerly on welfare rolls, others, especially the less-educated, worked in poor, dead-end jobs, made less than males in the same jobs, and frequently had to work part-time for lack of full-time opportunities. Although the Clinton administration did preside over a quiet transfer of income through a big increase in the earned income tax credit, some college funding programs and other programs, it used stealth to accomplish its greatest victories. Clinton was afraid the Democrats had shed the “tax and spend” smear too recently to risk making the economic case for greater social spending head-on.

But he was wrong. As I argue in “Why Economies Grow: The Forces that Shape Prosperity and How to Get Them Working Again,” social programs can be critical to economic growth. Under the sway of ever more conservative economic and political leaders, we have forgotten that growing demand is as much an engine for long-term economic growth as technology or savings. And much-maligned social programs — unemployment insurance, Social Security, the earned income tax credit and other types of public investment — are critical to maintaining strong demand by fostering greater income equality. Increasing the minimum wage will also put more dollars in the hands of consumers. My biggest regret about Clinton is that he didn’t use his formidable intellect and political skills to make that case to the American people.

President Bush, of course, is ideologically opposed to remedies that might address either the problems of the boom years, or of the recent downturn. And without the boom, many will say now is not the time to dramatically expand social programs. But what’s striking is the extent to which the president has managed, with the help of timid Democrats, to forestall debate on what sorts of spending we can and can’t afford, and which types of programs hurt or help the economy.

The president clearly follows three basic political rules. First, never admit a policy is wrong. Second, never show disloyalty by firing an appointee. And third, always claim the other guys are playing politics. None of the three are doing anything to improve the economy, but so far at least they’ve worked politically. Bush managed to retool his tax-cut proposal — which he floated during the 2000 campaign as the way to spend the surplus that accumulated during the boom years — as a remedy for the downturn. This is economic policy by accident, but he got away with it. Two years later, his only answer to the protracted economic slump is still more tax cuts — not for workers, mind you, but for investors and business. But it won’t work.

While some Republicans try to claim that tax cuts set the stage for America’s boom in the 1990s, they’re clearly wrong. The first big round of tax cuts, under President Reagan, took place in 1981, and the economy did not embark on sustained growth until 15 years later. It hardly seems like provable cause-and-effect, but tax-cut supporters are undeterred by the time lapse. Likewise, some argue that the capital gains tax cuts of 1997 caused the stock market boom, which increased federal tax revenue, but that’s disingenuous. New-economy talk and dot-com fever were reaching their heights. Profits soared. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve stepped on the monetary throttle hard in 1997 and 1998 to compensate for the international finance crises in those years. These are the factors that drove the market higher, not a capital gains tax cut.

In fact, the nation grew most rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s, when tax rates were much higher than now — indeed, that growth was even faster than growth in the late 1800s, when tax rates were meager. Clinton raised taxes on the rich in 1993, and the economy took off within the next two years — it might have done so sooner had Greenspan cut interest rates that year. And clearly, no one raised the capital gains tax in 2000 — and yet stocks fell, and federal tax revenues with them.

So what’s the answer now? Clearly the problem is not high taxes. One main problem is that business overinvested in high-technology equipment in the late 1990s, and we are not going to see aggressive business investment any time soon. A nation, indeed a world, with too much capacity to produce goods and services is not likely to see tax cuts for business and the wealthy succeed in restoring capital spending. We do not need tax cuts, as one businessman told me. We need people buying the products of American businesses.

Unemployment is one obstacle to such spending. Another obstacle is the high levels of debt consumers took on in the 1990s. Consumers have kept purchasing anyway, but the question is whether they will keep it up. If people fear they will lose their jobs, they are likely to cut back. GDP has to grow by 3 percent a year to produce a net gain in jobs. Few think it can do more than hobble along. The fall in stock prices is serious grounds for concern that the bottom could just fall out. And now housing prices may fall, too. (In some regions, like the technology-dependent San Francisco Bay Area, they’ve clearly begun to drop.)

Only a targeted package of social spending — including some tax cuts for the working and middle class — is reliably going to spur the economy. America needs a serious short-term fiscal stimulus. Congress should extend unemployment insurance, send money to newly cash-strapped states to keep up their health, education and welfare spending, and rescind the Bush tax cuts for the rich. A payroll tax cut for real working Americans could then be adopted, to promote spending now. These Social Security and disability taxes fall disproportionately on middle- and lower-income workers.

The components of an effective short-term stimulus plan are fairly simple. So it’s dispiriting not to hear more Democrats talk about them. House Minority leader Richard Gephardt has offered a plan to increase social spending, but also to cut as yet unspecified taxes for middle- and lower-income workers. Yet he refuses to support rescinding the Bush tax cuts on high-income Americans, even though they weaken the economy. Other Democrats, such as Teddy Kennedy, are supporting specific programs to expand unemployment insurance and raise the minimum wage. But there is no other broad plan to rescue the struggling economy.

Ironically, war and homeland security spending are helping to keep the economy from sinking. But it is unlikely that war spending will be sufficient stimulus to offset the spike in oil costs a war with Iraq almost certainly would trigger. And the high levels of public uncertainty, even fear, that would accompany such a war could very well keep stocks from rising, people from buying, and business from investing. The nation needs to invest in new demand directly, not merely as a byproduct of spending on war or national security.

And in the long run, we need to change the way voters and politicians understand economic tradeoffs. We need to balance the very real concerns over high federal deficits and inadequate American savings rates with the competing need to support a strong domestic market and economic equity. Savings will matter over time, but they cannot be emphasized to the exclusion of higher wages. Long-term deficits can be a drag on the economy, but short-term, targeted borrowing can be a stimulus. Free trade may be helpful, but domestic demand matters more.

Over time, we must address issues that the Bush administration simply won’t. Inequality must be targeted through expanded earnings tax credits, fairer welfare programs, a higher minimum wage, and efforts to root out the lasting effects of racial discrimination. One tragic lasting effect is the inequality and inadequacy of public education. Our tradition of locally funded K-12 schools has consigned poor children, disproportionately black and Latino, to crumbling buildings with poorly trained teachers and low standards, while wealthy suburban kids who start with every advantage get much more. Smart investment in education, preschool, day care and healthcare pays off in so many ways: By creating jobs to provide those services, we put dollars in the hands of people who’ll spend them. And by providing those crucial services, we develop a workforce that gives the nation a lasting competitive advantage that cannot readily be undermined by low-wage competition.

What is remarkable is the way we recoil from such an agenda. Yes, public spending can go too far. Yes, some Great Society programs were ineffective, inefficient and lacked accountability. But we have swung too far in the other direction. And even after eight years of prosperity under a Democratic administration, we could not revive the ideal of equity alongside economic growth, or make the case that one can lead to the other. It may be harder to make that case under a conservative Republican administration, and during an economic downturn. But we have no choice. Both fairness and the need to begin the economic recovery require that we begin soon.

The tax cut is not essentially about tax cuts. It is about the kind of nation the American public wants. It’s about whether we, as a country, want to use our government to improve our lives or whether we’d rather try to make it disappear, forsaking in the process a long history of government-funded social programs, including scholarships, infrastructure and Social Security. It’s about whether we want a government that responds to the needs of the changing times or turns away from them.

But before we return to that issue, let me set the record straight on some of the ways the Bush administration has deceived us in supporting tax cuts.

The tax cut is premised on the expectation that the federal government will produce a few trillion dollars of surplus over the next 10 years. But the contention that the fiscal surpluses projected by the Congressional Budget Office, on which the tax cuts are based, are in any way reliable is nonsense.

The forecasting also depends on an increase in total budget expenditures that more or less only matches inflation over the next 10 years. This Congress is not likely to achieve that increase — nor should it. The result is that in order to pay for the tax cut, the federal government will almost certainly have to run down the Social Security trust fund.

Then there is this by now well-known piece of White House chicanery: Tax cut proponents have excluded from budget calculations the amount of revenue lost in the 10th year of the 10-year program, revenue that could add an additional $300 billion or so to the tax cut.

Another formidable piece of deceitfulness — an admittedly effective one — has been what we might call the “overcharge” rhetoric. President Bush tells us that he is simply giving back to the American people the money that they were “overcharged.” To those inclined to believe him, this no doubt sounds like straight talk. He is giving back “your money.” But as Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said recently, it may be your money, but it is our social programs.

Taxes are not a fixed price one charges the public, like retailers do for a carton of orange juice. They are calculated as a proportion of incomes that rise and fall with the fortunes of the economy. If the American people are now being “overcharged” for government services, it is because the economy is strong and their incomes are high, not because they are paying more than the value of the services they are receiving. Are Americans being undercharged when the nation runs a fiscal deficit? And will President Bush therefore raise taxes if we dip back into the red?

The Bush administration claims that all taxpayers are getting a break under the plan. Moreover, these advocates say that under any tax cut, the rich will always disproportionately benefit because they pay more in taxes.

The truth is, you can distribute tax benefits any way you choose, and this tax cut is a whopping advantage to the rich. More than 35 percent of the benefits of the tax cut will go to the top 1 percent of earners. About 50 percent will go to the top 10 percent of earners. And 70 percent of the benefits will go to the top 20 percent.

It is not clear to me how history will judge a nation that gives a tax break to the rich just after the top 1 to 10 percent accrued more personal wealth than at any other time since the robber-baron period of the late 1800s.

Long ago, the nation decided that the rich would help the not so rich because financial privilege does confer advantage. A progressive income tax was adopted in the early 1900s. (It was first tried during the Civil War.) Now, when the rich are really rich, we seem to have forgotten the lessons of the past.

This remarkable piece of tax legislation was signed into law in June for several reasons. First, the media, though it made an issue of the inequality of benefits to be distributed through Bush’s tax cuts, did not make much of one. Second, Alan Greenspan, a respected Federal Reserve chairman but not one very well known for his sensitivity to the plight of the those with lower incomes, endorsed the bill publicly.

Third, the Bush administration gave tax cuts all its attention, using tactics that were, admittedly, brilliant. It dangled a tax reduction before the American people without providing a budget, which would have told them exactly what spending programs they were cutting.

Fourth, the economy slowed down precipitously just around the time of the presidential election. This, ironically, justified the need for fiscal stimulus, even a tax cut that was widely considered to be bad for the economy in the long run. Fifth, the Senate was still Republican. Sen. Jim Jeffords became an independent only after the tax cut vote.

One more point: The “overcharge” gambit worked, and the media was not up to the challenge. Bending over backward to give new presidents the benefit of the doubt during the transition is a time-honored tradition. But this time it was even more damaging than usual.

The deepest deceit of this tax bill, however, is that it is not essentially about tax cuts at all. As I said, it is about the kind of nation one wants. So significant are the cuts that over time they will seriously impede America’s ability to adopt new social programs, and they may even cut into existing programs. If the tax cut bill is kept intact and the estate tax is eliminated, about $3 trillion of revenue will be lost in the second decade of its enactment. So this tax cut is really about limiting government, not about giving people their money back.

There is a powerful myth at the bottom of this kind of thinking. We increasingly seem to believe that government is at best a necessary evil, and that the only way to control it is to limit it. We do not devote our energies any longer to making it better, devising exciting new programs that may work or utilizing its power to make American life more equitable.

Moreover, we seem to think that this is and always was the American way. In fact, America always had new economies, and new economies created new needs. In the past, government helped the nation adjust to those new needs. Today, it is withdrawing from that arena.

In the early 1800s, for example, America was an agricultural economy. Its $15 million payment to France for the Louisiana Purchase was intended to ensure the little guy access to land. But that was only part of it. The federal government reduced land prices, offered credit arrangements for purchases, forgave debt and even protected the rights of squatters time and again as the economy matured in the 1800s.

When large industrial enterprises were beginning to burgeon in the 1820s and 1830s, government made limited liability legal so that investors could put up money without fear of personal bankruptcy or debtor prison.

When the nation needed canals, the state governments, led by New York, built them.

When a commercial society clearly needed a more educated workforce, local government developed a free primary education system that was soon the envy of the world.

An information age? By the 1830s, the federal mails were a model of efficiency, traversing the land by stagecoach, steamships and finally railroads.

All these were responses to the new economies of their day. After the Civil War, the federal government subsidized the railroads. It built new research universities. It protected workers, established a progressive income tax and gave women the right to vote. After the panic of 1907, the sixth or seventh major panic over the course of a century, it implemented the Federal Reserve System.

The federal government did — and failed to do — a lot of controversial things as well. It could have been more aggressive about building roads and waterways in the early 1800s. It fought Native Americans in brutal wars in the name of manifest destiny. If it had acted on slavery before cotton became king, it would have avoided the nation’s great tragedy. As it was, it liberated slaves at great cost, only to deprive African-Americans of civil rights for another century. It did not cope well with poverty, and still does not.

But the government kept adjusting as economies evolved. In the 1920s, it built roads to accommodate new cars and trucks. Local government built high schools for a populace that required still-better education to compete in a more sophisticated economy.

After World War II, America sent its soldiers to college, it built the highway system, it funded massive amounts of research and development, and it subsidized student loans after the USSR’s Sputnik launch jarred the nation.

Now, a new economy has new needs and the men (and an occasional woman) in the White House are tone-deaf to them. Two-thirds of women with small children now work. Families work three months longer each year than they did in the past. Jobs are more insecure, as are health insurance and retirement income. Male wages just do not keep up on average, deeply wounding the esteem of a nation where one job was once enough to support a family. The nation faces generally increasing insecurity, and the government is nowhere to be found: Small wonder that citizens no longer trust it.

Is government the complete answer? No. But lack of government is not the answer, either. Unfortunately, that is what this tax cut bill is about. The nation’s economy changes, and the response of this administration is not to adjust but to withdraw and deplete the nation of the tools it needs — the tools with which it always faced the future in the past. Amazing, really, how divorced Washington is from American life. Do not think America will simply survive four more years of such backwardness. These years will take a permanent toll.