Here is a companion piece to Charles Krauthammer's analysis of Obama's deliberate plan to drive America into economic and military power decline.
The centerpiece of Obama's strategy to seize control of American lives to make economic decline a reality not just a hope is "health care reform." With the government in charge of health care, costs will do nothing but skyrocket. Government-run Medicaid and Medicare are two excellent examples to use for forecasting.
Now the economist writer Robert Samuelson analyzes some new statistics about American population growth and spending and finds that, indeed, Obama can deliver the decline in the American standard of living he seeks. After all, why should Americans live better than others in the world?
Some excerpts:
Every generation of Americans should live better than its predecessor. That's Americans' core definition of economic "progress." But for today's young, it may be a mirage. Higher health spending, increasing energy prices and stretched governments at all levels may squeeze future disposable incomes -- what people have to spend -- and public services. Are we condemning our children to downward mobility?
The young's future has been heavily mortgaged. Taken together, all these demands might neutralize gains in per capita incomes, especially if the economy's performance, burdened by higher taxes or budget deficits, deteriorated. One study by Steven Nyce and Sylvester Schieber of Watson Wyatt Worldwide, a consulting firm, examined just health spending. The continuation of present trends would result in "falling wages at the bottom of the earnings spectrum and very slow wage growth on up the earnings distribution. These dismal wage outcomes would persist over at least the next couple of decades."
The health debate has focused on insuring the uninsured and de-emphasized controlling runaway spending, much of which is ineffective. The priorities should have been reversed. The chance to reorder the medical-industrial complex to restrain costs and improve care has been mostly squandered. Some call this "reform"; no one should call it progress.
A Path to Downward Mobility. Read it all.
Here’s a thumbnail of what it takes, in my view, for a society to be prosperous:
1) An inventive / innovative class; people have to want to invent things and processes;
2) Cross-culturalization, where multiple inventors get together and compare their inventions, and newer \ better inventions are created;
3) Seaports or trade route intersections;
4) Business flowing from invention / innovation;
5) Decent jobs flowing from business, so people can take care of their families with pride;
6) A reasonably decent life flowing from more people having jobs; and
7) Education encouraging the repeat of the process.
Either some force in society sets this in motion, governs the process, and maintains it, or it does not. If you leave it to chance, you might be on top for a while but you will not be on top indefinitely. But that is a cost of freedom, when you do not direct people what to do with their lives.
My suspicion is that China will be the next world power because they tell more people what to do, and they are more controlling. More free? Of course not. But more planning, organization, consistency, and coordination take place under their model. We in the U.S. use the “herding cats” model, and there are benefits and costs associated with it.
We’ve needed more inventors for years, and few in our country have paid attention to that issue.