Having been born in 1952, I have witnessed America at its peak of power - both in terms of industrial power and innovation and material progress. Now, it seems I am witnessing an accelerating decline driven largely by the refusal of too many politicians to care for the fate of all citizens, stop heaping tax benefits on the increasingly rich, and a concerted effort by the far right to dismantle the U.S. Constitution and make religious and racial based bigotry the hallmark of the nation. Old Europe has surged ahead of the USA in granting equality to all citizens. Now parts of Latin America are doing so as well. And don't even get me started on the USA's failure to provide a health care safety net to all citizens which would save lives and in my view lower costs because catastrophic illness could be lessened through preventive care. When middle class people increasingly don't go to the doctor because of co-payment costs (or because they have lost employer paid coverage) it is a pretty damning situation. And does anyone care? Certainly not the GOP and its Christianist allies with whom everything is about their own wants and needs. Their motto ought to be "To Hell With Everyone Else" even though it is the opposite of the Christian dogma they claim to worship. Paul Krugman had a column over the weekend that looks at America's descent toward a third world country. It's sobering - and unfortunately it's correct in its analysis. If one wonders how ancient Rome collapsed from within one only need look at the USA's suicide from within and it has nothing to do with the acceptance of homosexuality. Here are some highlights:*
The lights are going out all over America — literally. Colorado Springs has made headlines with its desperate attempt to save money by turning off a third of its streetlights, but similar things are either happening or being contemplated across the nation, from Philadelphia to Fresno.
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Meanwhile, a country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself: in a number of states, local governments are breaking up roads they can no longer afford to maintain, and returning them to gravel.
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And a nation that once prized education — that was among the first to provide basic schooling to all its children — is now cutting back. Teachers are being laid off; programs are being canceled; in Hawaii, the school year itself is being drastically shortened. And all signs point to even more cuts ahead.
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And it’s true that state and local governments, hit hard by the recession, are cash-strapped. But they wouldn’t be quite as cash-strapped if their politicians were willing to consider at least some tax increases.
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And the federal government, which can sell inflation-protected long-term bonds at an interest rate of only 1.04 percent, isn’t cash-strapped at all. It could and should be offering aid to local governments, to protect the future of our infrastructure and our children.
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[A] large part of our political class is showing its priorities: given the choice between asking the richest 2 percent or so of Americans to go back to paying the tax rates they paid during the Clinton-era boom, or allowing the nation’s foundations to crumble — literally in the case of roads, figuratively in the case of education — they’re choosing the latter. It’s a disastrous choice in both the short run and the long run.
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And what about the economy’s future? Everything we know about economic growth says that a well-educated population and high-quality infrastructure are crucial. Emerging nations are making huge efforts to upgrade their roads, their ports and their schools. Yet in America we’re going backward.
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How did we get to this point? It’s the logical consequence of three decades of antigovernment rhetoric, rhetoric that has convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a dollar wasted, that the public sector can’t do anything right.
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[W]e’re seeing what was actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.
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So the end result of the long campaign against government is that we’ve taken a disastrously wrong turn. America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere.
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