WASHINGTON—The reason so many inner-city youngsters are tempted into the high-risk, high-profit drug racket, a Washington police official ventured the other day, is that they are fundamentally fatalists, neither demanding nor expecting more from life than short-term gain.

The rest of us may think about “marriage, families, planning for retirement, owning a home,” said Assistant Chief Isaac Fulwood. “But these kids don’t think about that. They think their lives are going to be short, so they figure they’re going to have some fun while they’re here. They live only for today.”

If you wonder where these desperate and dangerous youngsters ever got such a short-sighted notion, just look at the news.

I’ve just seen a story about an investment group that wants to take over the Zenith Electronics Corp. and sell off its consumer-electronics unit.

No matter that Zenith is America’s sole surviving manufacturer of television sets, or that the move to take it out of television manufacturing comes at precisely the time when the introduction of high-definition TV promises to revolutionize the industry, perhaps spawning a huge range of new electronics products.

The short-term profit is in divestiture, even though in the long term it will mean conceding the new technology to Japan, with serious implications for the American economy.

Is this financial wizardry really so different from the fatalism that keeps inner-city youngsters from seeing beyond the transient pleasures of next weekend?

America is addicted to the short term. Our business executives, in dismaying contrast to their Japanese counterparts, refuse to look beyond next quarter’s profit statements, even though they know that the long-term health of their enterprises may entail near-term sacrifice.

There is hardly a member of Congress who will propose long-term solutions to our pressing problems. They are running for re-election almost from the time they arrive here, and while they may understand that America’s long-term health requires major attention to today’s at-risk youngsters, they also understand that their political careers turn on short-term voter pleasure.

Are the young people who eschew the future-oriented sacrifice of education and hard work at entry-level jobs, who, in Chief Fulwood’s description, “live only for today,” really so different?

It isn’t just a question of individual decisions. One of the reasons the Japanese—and increasingly the European Economic Community—are able to engage in long-term planning is that their governments underwrite the sacrifices it entails.

Attempts to involve the U.S. government in underwriting consumer-goods research are put down as un-American notions of a planned economy. The genius of America, we are told again and again, is its profit-driven free-enterprise system. And there is no question that, for most of this country’s existence, it has worked very well.

But it has worked best when it has focused on present-day investment for long-term institutional health. The financial news of today is more about new acquisitions and divestitures than about new products; more about arbitrage and other financial manipulations than about invention.

The result is that a few people become enormously rich while the long-term economic health of the country suffers.

Chief Fulwood sees clearly that the short-sightedness of money-mad drug merchants is luring them into premature death. Shouldn’t it be just as clear that our focus on the short-term pay-off—in business, politics and in government—threatens to produce the same result for America?