Editor's Letter: Who should pay?

last updated 8 January 2015

Back in the 20th century, when the Knicks were good and tickets were reasonable, I spent many happy moments at Madison Square Garden. But it’s more than a decade since I’ve gone to a pro basketball game, and not just because the Knicks turned into a joke. The mediocre $50 seats I used to buy climbed to $100, and then $200 and beyond. I won’t pay such ridiculous prices to watch $20 million players who refuse to pass or play defense. Apparently, many other disgruntled fans agree: With attendance dropping and many teams losing money, the NBA’s bubble has finally popped, and owners and players have shut the league down as they fight over shrinking revenues. This impasse, Steve Pearlstein points out this week in The Washington Post, is not limited to pro basketball. The artificial affluence of the past two decades is over, and in Washington, in Europe, and virtually everywhere in the post-bubble world, people are fighting over “how to distribute the losses and apportion the pain.”

In theory, most people accept the need to make do with less. In practice, we think it would be far fairer for someone else to surrender benefits and pay higher taxes. This is why the congressional supercommittee decided in the end to decide nothing. Why not wait another year to start closing the deficit? The eurozone nations are stuck in the same procrastination syndrome, as they try to avoid the massive, TARP-like bailout of Greece, Italy, and other nations that most economists think will be necessary to save the euro. Rather than take our losses now, we’ll all keep kicking the can down the road—until we run out of road.