What follows is...
an attempt to think about the right wing in the US. I am amazed by the Tea Party and conservative Republicans. They seem incomprehensibly mean and selfish and also utterly clueless about how a modern society runs. We need infrastructure and public health and education, or the country will crumble and collapse like the 35-W bridge. What is so hard about realizing that you have to invest? And what is so hard about realizing that it's expensive to neglect and deprive people? If you don't pay for hospitals and schools, then you will pay for prisons and security guards and mercenary soldiers.
If you impoverish Americans, who will buy the nation's goods and services? Since WWII the economy has depended on a large working class affluent enough to buy cars, appliances, houses, vacations, college educations... Increasingly the economy depends on luxury goods, but there are not enough rich people to sustain the kind of economy we have now. You can go for a while on consumer debt and cheap goods from China. But this will come to a stop, and has largely come to a stop. Then what? A third world economy? But third world economies are dependent on exporting raw materials and goods to the industrialized world, and the US is the largest consumer market in the world, described until recently as the engine of the world economy. Who is going to replace it, and buy what it exports, if it can find anything to export, except food?
Anyway, I am puzzled by the anger and meanness and cluelessness of the country's right wing. So I decided to write about anger. It's pretty obvious stuff, me thinking out loud.
If you impoverish Americans, who will buy the nation's goods and services? Since WWII the economy has depended on a large working class affluent enough to buy cars, appliances, houses, vacations, college educations... Increasingly the economy depends on luxury goods, but there are not enough rich people to sustain the kind of economy we have now. You can go for a while on consumer debt and cheap goods from China. But this will come to a stop, and has largely come to a stop. Then what? A third world economy? But third world economies are dependent on exporting raw materials and goods to the industrialized world, and the US is the largest consumer market in the world, described until recently as the engine of the world economy. Who is going to replace it, and buy what it exports, if it can find anything to export, except food?
Anyway, I am puzzled by the anger and meanness and cluelessness of the country's right wing. So I decided to write about anger. It's pretty obvious stuff, me thinking out loud.
posted by Eleanor at 7:24 AM
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