Uncle Jack contributes FAR, FAR more than minimum wage workers, not only as a percentage of his income, but in actual dollar amounts. Minimum wage workers pay zero in federal income tax.
This isn’t going into debt for cars and houses and other infrequent purchases. These are regular operating expenses. It would be like Americans putting food, gasoline, and utilities on their credit cards.
Here is American politics for you.
Eight straight years of deficit spending by a president using the money to drop bombs on brown people is good. Two years of deficit spending by a president using the money to stimulate the economy and reform the health care system to make it more accessible to poor people is bad.
How so? Do you know what percentage of government spending goes toward servicing the debt? You might be surprised to know that it’s lower than the average family spends to service their own debt.
To understand American politics, you have to understand Americans. Of course, there are Americans all over the political spectrum, so it’s hard to pin us down.
My view: By and large we are spoiled. We want what we want, and we want it now. We don’t want anyone telling us what we can and can’t do. If a program benefits us personally, it’s a Good Thing. If we perceive it as a good deal, we may be filled with glee at taking advantage of it. If something benefits someone else, then it’s a Waste of Resources and should be done away with. We see ourselves as Individuals and have little concept of ‘promoting the general welfare’ as our Founding Fathers said we should. If something is done to ‘promote the general welfare’, it is Socialist. (NB: Socialist = Stalin, Kim Jong Il, and Hitler all rolled into one Evil Entity.)
Of course when asked, everyone agrees that police forces are a good thing, as they protect society. Roads and bridges are good things, because they allow us freedom to travel. Public schools are good, because we don’t have to pay the full tuition to educate our children. Childless people like me pay for other people’s kids to go to school. But that’s OK, since it benefits society to have an educated populace. There are scads of examples of ‘socialist’ expenditures that we Individuals agree are good to promote. But we Americans are not deep thinkers. We want simple answers. We’d rather not have to think situations through. Just go in with guns blazing, and Might makes Right. So things like health care are Socialist because we don’t understand that a healthy population is more productive and better for the economy and for the country. We don’t see how better health enriches us personally. We think it’s better to pay half a million dollars to treat someone after an illness takes hold, than to spend a thousand dollars to keep the illness from taking hold in the first place.
So American politics is a war between those who say ‘An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’ and those who say ‘I’m all right, Jack. Keep your hands off of my stack.’
Because the debt keeps increasing every year and deficits are perpetual (and yes, even Clinton never really eliminated this except by counting the SS income). This year to a tune of $1.5 trillion. It’s not like an average family where one year they take out a loan to buy a car and the next four to five years they work at paying it off.
To continue the analogy, it would be like buying a car, making interest only payments for 5 years, and then buying another new car.
Well, my explanation of American Politics is:
Most of us are not paying attention at all.
The few of us who are paying attention fall into small groups, most of whom are more interested in one narrow aspect of human society, and base all of our political involvement on that narrow aspect, and otherwise join the majority that is not paying attention.
Once we elect someone, we believe ardently that everything that happens in the world is their fault.
So, generally, we re-elect them.
Then we bitch about it.
Tris
Here’s my attempt to explain American politics.
There are two spectrums on which people’s political ideologies lie: the fiscal spectrum and the social spectrum.
On the fiscal spectrum, the right wants smaller government and the left wants larger government (see below for why the last part isn’t really correct). The right generally thinks that a smaller government promotes economic growth and that government “meddling” in people’s economic affairs should be restricted as much as possible. The left generally thinks that we should achieve a “just society,” and government programs (such as welfare and affirmative action and some form of universal health care) are the way to get there. Saying the left “wants larger government” is a bit misleading–they just want the government to do stuff and don’t care about the size of government.
On the social spectrum, the above positions are generally switched. The right generally thinks that things should be a certain way and government power should be used to achieve their desired outcomes. The left generally thinks the government should take a hands-off approach.
The Republicans are generally right on both spectrums, and the Democrats are generally left on both spectrums.
The Tea Party movement is a loosely affiliated group of lots of different organizations who all generally want smaller government. They really don’t have a definite position on the social spectrum, but I think we can presume that many (if not most) of them are on the right on the social spectrum.
Finally, there’s a lot of talking past each other that goes on. For example, on the fiscal spectrum, the left generally thinks that the government should help poor people, so they think that the right thinks that the government should help rich people. But those on the right don’t think that–they just favor policies that the left thinks unfairly helps rich people over poor people; but generally those on the right don’t consciously want the government to enact policies that help rich people.
Its not really a very good analogy at any level.
The reason income is so low is because of tax cuts and lower revenues due to the recession.
The reason spending right now is so high is because we have engaged in stimulus spending and there are more people on unemployment and food stamps.
If we get rid of the effects of the recession, the tax cuts and the stimulus, we STILL need some cuts but we have effectively eliminated the vast majority of what your friend is worried about.
We have to address medicare (and to a much lesser extent, social security) and we can probably cut a little bit from the discretionary budget but to be honest we have had 3 decades of cost cutting, there simply isn’t a lot of fat left.
Everyone in America thinks everyone else in America is Out To Get Them. And they’re right. That’s American politics in a nutshell.
Well said bra.
It’s very easy to understand American politics by simply applying Kohlberg’s Moral Hierarchy:
Level 1 = Tea Party
Level 2 = Republicans/Conservatives
Level 3 = Democrats/Liberals
From Wikipedia: