A
lright Max, bait taken.
We could have a longer debate about why America is rich, which is kind of a ridiculous question to take on with three bullet points, especially ones not obviously correlated to economic superiority and that don’t include the fact that the rest of the world was torn to pieces after WWII and America wasn’t, but we’ll leave that for now.
Let’s look at the things you mention: “health care, education, research & development, new infrastructure, new renewable energy sources, and more inclusive social life.”
All things “highly correlated” with long-term national prosperity. I hate to point out the obvious here Max, but correlation is not causation. Do you think maybe spending in those areas is correlated with prosperity because of prosperity, not the other way around? It seems far more likely that prosperity is the chicken here than the egg.
These are also all things, with the exceptions of health care and social inclusion (which, while really important on moral grounds, are circuitously related to economic growth at best), that almost any Republican would be in favor of spending money on. I admit that they might be less cavalier about it now given the new prominence of the deficit in the public consciousness, but to suggest that it is inherent in Republican economic policy to abhor spending in those areas is ridiculous.
If Republicans were against spending money on those things (and war of course), would the deficit be where it is right now?
On the topic of “pro-wealth” (need I mention the idiocy of the term? Who is anti-wealth?): I’m a little bit unclear what you mean by public-wealth. Are you defining private-wealth as rich people and public-wealth as everybody else? Or are you defining private-wealth as the wealth of citizens and corporations and public-wealth as that of the government? In either case, I think that the distinction is a tad silly (unless you’re talking about wealth disparity, in which case you should call it wealth disparity). The discussion that we should be having is about creating wealth. Things like infrastructure projects and research and development do this, just as tax incentives to invest and hire do. I think we’re on the same page here, but your terminology is poor.
There are no easy answers to this, but somehow I don’t think snarkily describing Republicans as “historically hostile” to nondiscriminatory rule of law is going to do much for us.
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