Alfonse D'Amato

Let’s get our eye back on the ball

Posted

When you turn on the news or read the papers these days, do you get a sense of disconnection between what really affects our daily lives and our families’ well-being, and what passes for important news in the media and in political circles? I do, and I think it’s a symptom of a distraction from reality that is undermining our common purpose.
When I ask my fellow Long Islanders what they worry about most, they invariably talk about the high cost of living, exorbitant property taxes, the squeeze on family income (even for those with two incomes), stratospheric college bills, the uncertainty over whether their young people will find jobs here and afford to live as well as their parents have, and trains that don’t get them to work on time.
Then I turn to the news, and I’m informed that the biggest question is whether the Russians tried to influence the 2016 election. Pardon me, but I assume the Russians have tried to influence every election in my lifetime, just as we’ve probably tried to influence every one of theirs, at least since they’ve been having them. During the Cold War, we each spent vast sums trying to undermine and destabilize each other. Afterward, we warily circled each other rather than finding a way to work together.
So now we’re dealing with the fallout from this endless U.S.-Russia conflict. And no matter what’s proposed to ease tensions between us, it’s filtered through this conflict and thrown into needless dispute. It may be inconvenient for the U.S. media and political pundits to report or admit it, but Presidents Trump and Putin actually made some significant progress in their first face-to-face meeting. While it has garnered far less attention than deserved, the two leaders negotiated a cease-fire in parts of Syria that just might signal a winding down of that horrible war at long last.
And they put on the table a worthy idea to establish a shared cybersecurity effort that was mercilessly attacked in the U.S. without a chance to be heard. Remember, we already cooperate with Russian today. Americans fly into space on Russian rockets and share the International Space Station with them. Both countries are susceptible to hacking that can cripple power plants and electric grids, financial institutions and transportation systems.

Remember President Reagan’s Star Wars missile defense proposal, which he even offered to share with the Russians? He was derided as naïve by his detractors, but now, with threats from rogue nuclear nations like North Korea, the U.S. is racing to build just such a missile defense system. Today, cybersecurity is one of the world’s biggest challenges, so what’s so terrible about the idea of a “hot line” like the one we’ve had for years to avoid nuclear weapons miscues? Maybe by sharing in a common defense, the U.S. and Russia could reduce the tensions that plague our relations.
Rather than nay-saying the president and second-guessing his every move, our leaders need to get their eyes back on the ball and address the hard issues that actually matter to working middle-class families. That means, first and foremost, kick-starting our economy with carefully targeted tax reform to stimulate business and job growth. Cutting U.S. corporate taxes, which are among the highest in the world, would help repatriate trillions of dollars these companies are hoarding overseas to avoid high taxes here. This money could be directed toward badly needed infrastructure improvements.
Which leads me to the situation in our own backyard. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority must get its act together and fast-track long-overdue improvements to our ailing rail system. Frankly, I’m tired of hearing the excuses for foot-dragging on rail projects that get tied up in the MTA bureaucracy for years.
And the agency should stop complaining about its finances. It is sitting on billions of dollars in available transit improvement funds, just waiting to be put to use fixing problems that have persisted for ages. I’m hopeful that under the leadership of Joe Lhota, who has returned to take over the MTA helm, things will finally start to move there. If anybody can light a fire under the MTA bureaucrats, he can!
These are the kinds of real-life issues that ought to be the focus of our attention. Congress and the president should get past their obsession with repealing Obamacare and instead work to fix the problems with our health insurance system to help hold down spiraling insurance costs. They should attack the ridiculously high cost of college education that is crushing young Americans with debt. They should continue to reduce the regulatory burden that strangles small businesses and community financial institutions. They should trim wasteful spending to slow down deficits and mounting national debt.
If our leaders finally do get their eyes back on the ball, there’s real hope that our nation and state could build a more prosperous future. That’s what Long Islanders expect, and it’s what they deserve.

Al D’Amato, a former U.S. senator from New York, is the founder of Park Strategies LLC, a public policy and business development firm. Comments about this column? ADAmato@liherald.com.