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The following book was selected for discussion in the sprint of 2005.
| Title | Author | Information | Submitted by |
| Running on Empty: How The Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It | Peter G. Peterson | $24, Hard-back, Farrar, Straus and Giroux | Art Smoot This was selected by 18 votes compared to the runner up's 13 votes. |
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From http://www.enotalone.com " Over the last several years, former Secretary Of Commerce Pete Petersen has become something of a cottage industry in and of himself, writing several books, appearing as a pundit on talk shows, and acting as chairperson for both the Blackstone Group and the prestigious Council for Foreign Relations (CFR). Here he continues the caustic warnings he first articulated in 'Gray Dawn', a polemic ranting against the potentially devastating consequences of the graying of the American population and the stress this demographic factor would have on growing federal deficits, the aging population itself, and on the national debt. He amplifies those warnings by making a rather alarming set of observations as to the consequences of the reckless and foolhardy policies of the current federal government, policies that combine the worst elements of supply side 'voodoo economics' with continued growth in federal entitlement programs.
The mix, Mr. Petersen argues, may become a disastrous witch's brew with catastrophic results both for the domestic economy and the continued well-being of the American people. He saves his most strident criticism for the style of morally questionable leadership currently in vogue, a reckless world view that seems to shamelessly trade immediate and permanent tax cuts for the very wealthy for a mounting tidal wave of debt for our children and their heirs. In detailing his grievances with current policies, Petersen cites a series of common partisan myths, including the notion that the majority of the elderly are poor, that more elderly than children are poor, that Americans are over-taxed, that providing tax cuts for the rich can successfully shrink government, and that imposing so-called 'means-testing' for federal benefits will be catastrophic for the needy. The author places the majority of the blame for our current set of problems upon the shoulders of a variety of forces within contemporary society, from interest groups and their lobbies to an almost pathological concern with short-term results, to the cult of individualism we all seem to suffer from, and, of course, to generational change. He views a number of strategies as potentially helpful in abating the negative set of circumstances we are ensconced in; indexing social security benefits to prices rather than wages, extending health care to all using the plan offered to federal employees as a model, and forcing Congress to include unfunded retirement obligations in the balance sheet (thus ending the thirty five year old sham of never mentioning to the American people the reason we have such a serious shortfall in social security funds in the out-years is because the federal government has consistently and quite deliberately violated the provisions of the Social Security law by spending the extra funds collected every year rather than investing them in accordance with federal law and allowing the investment income to grow). " | |||