Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman’s column is particularly insightful this week. He provides a clear analysis of the unsustainable direction where our nation’s economy and infrastructure has been headed; it isn’t a pretty picture.
Krugman explains how decades of anti-government rhetoric and massive tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% of the populace have helped to systematically degrade our country’s employment levels, schools, transportation and overall infrastructure. Here is an excerpt of what he had to say :
“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.
How did we get to this point? It’s the logical consequence of three decades of anti-government 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.The anti-government campaign has always been phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud — to checks sent to welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats uselessly pushing paper around. But those were myths, of course; there was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed. And now that the campaign has reached fruition, we’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.”
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.
About Rhonda Winter
Hi all,
There is an old adage stating that the more you know, the more you realize you, in fact, know nothing. Where global sustainability is the matter at hand, the script gets flipped; the more you know / the additional knowledge one acquires, the deeper your genuine certitude runs; a
certitude that all things occurring everywhere, in respect to everything "green" are bandages at best; breeders of false hopes at their very worst. I say this for one and one reason alone; the single, solitary factor that is going to unravel all of our kith and kin's most strategically sound plans is the one keyhole for which there is no key: population explosion / loss of control / an inexhaustible search for resources. Yet, to even utter so makes one a pariah in eco circles, and venture into territories where many a loon lay in wait for some Draconian legislation on a universal scale. Either / or scenario is scary as hell to ponder; but, lets get down to brass tax: address global population; until that begins, all else is moot.
Len Pipkin
Jonesboro, Arkansas
19014869045