Today is November 3, 2010, the day after the mid term elections which brought a wave of change into state governments, put Republicans in control of the House and weakened the Democrats in the Senate. This vote reflects a population that seeing its standard of living and security decrease. Many are grasping at anything that they think may return things to what they once knew. Many of those supported the upstart Tea Party.
The great irony of course, is that the agenda of the new Republicans and Tea Party will benefit the extremely wealthy elite who fund both but if unchecked will actually make the plight of the middle and lower socioeconomic classes worse. They were duped. This made possible by the elite's newly acquired (thanks to a recent Supreme Court decision) power to spend unlimited amounts on campaigns, propaganda and media ads.
The really big decision before us is one that is not spoken or written about much but is at the root of the ideological differences between the political parties. That is the choice between being a 1st world developed nation with rights of citizenship including health care and social security or devolving to something like the developing economies which don't have similar rights. The latter choice would not require as much government as we now have but would mean a lower standard of living for the middle and lower classes. Either choice will reduce the deficit but in opposite ways. The first choice calls for increasing revenue (taxes - particularly on the very wealthy) to pay for our current programs. The second choice calls for reducing taxes (primarily on the wealthy) and offsetting that with reduced the social and government services (Social Security and Medicare). The outcome either way is something different from what we as Americans have come to expect and different from how we view ourselves as a prosperous, fair, high achieving people of great military power and wealth.
However, with the second choice debt reduction will only occur if the entitlements are actually reduced which has not happened. Proponents have been pursuing the policy of unlimited spending and borrowing with the hope that the nation will be put into a position where the only option to avoid default on the national dept would be to cut the entitlements. They call this "Stave the Beast." Many supporters of the previous Republican administrations (an newly elected congress) may not have realized that they were actually supporting that.
I was pleasantly surprised to hear David Stockman, Director of Office of Management and Budget for President Ronald Reagan who killed our rampant inflation of early 80s come out essentially for the first choice. Recently on 60 minutes he advocated not only eliminating the Bush tax cuts but increasing taxes more on the wealthy. He pointed out that more of the nation's wealth has gravitated to the top 5% of population since 1980 than in history before then. See the link below for a full breakdown of the distribution of wealth. The only country with a larger percentage of wealth in the top 10% than the U.S. is Switzerland. http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
