| Often, spending a lot of money now can save you even more money in the long run. Owning a house
can be better than renting, for example, even though you have to make a big down payment and your mortgage payments
might be higher than rent would be, because eventually, you'll finish all your payments and not only will you have
no more mortgage or rent payments, but you'll own a house. Buying a new or nearly new car can often be better than
buying really old used ones, too, because the new car will get better gas mileage and need fewer repairs and last
longer, so that by the time 20 years have gone by, you might actually have spent less for the new car than you
would have spent on used cars. (Plus, for those twenty years, you simply had a nicer car!) The problem is that
many people can't afford that initial big investment that makes things cheaper in the long run. One of the problems in this country is that we don't always have the will power to make big investments into essential projects that will make them cheaper in the long run. Liberals and progressives usually want to make much bigger investments in infrastructure than conservatives do, and the compromise is usually that only enough gets spent to keep that old used car barely running. Then, when it breaks down again and the liberals and progressives come back to ask for more money, people feel they've been cheated and the money is being thrown away, and they don't want to spend any more. Well, yes, in a sense, the money was being thrown away. When you only take half measures, you are only throwing money away, in a sense, because you're just meeting the needs of today, without thinking about tomrrow. What might we accomplish if we could invest all the time and effort needed to truly solve a problem? How bad would the crime problem be today, for example, if we had really invested fully in eliminating poverty, or improving our schools? How bad would the problem of racial inequality be today, if we had committed to more than the half measures of desegregation and affirmative action in the past? (Yes, you heard right. I'm a progressive, but I believe that these two policies were only half measures, doomed to fail. Now, I do think they were both good things to try, because half measures are better than no measures, but I wonder sometimes how things might have gone differently with an even fuller investment in solving the race problems in this country, and I may write more about this some day on this site.) |