I see you’ve bought into the Republican myth that the reason Americans have a shoddy social support infrastructure is due to budgetary tradeoffs. It’s not. It’s a failure of will of the American people to do what’s necessary to stop preventable innocent casualties.
Care to elaborate? I probably have, I was raised in that environment, though, I wouldn’t call myself right leaning on most things.
Isn’t there a way to spend the money you’re going to spend on that to spend it on like food availability, or affordable housing, or education…?
I think this sentence is what I was trying to point out. Basically, it’s not a question of “pay for X or Y” but a question of “do we have the votes for X, will Americans reelect us for Y”. Let me detail:
Americans don’t care about or understand the deficit
There has never been a true austerity party in the US. Bush Sr. ran on cutting taxes. Bush Jr. ran on massive tax cuts. Trump’s taxation policy was a massive billionaire tax cut. Every single time a Republican has been in office for the past three decades they’ve exploded the deficit by cutting revenue without substantial enough spending cuts. They still win reelection.
Americans “concerned about the deficit” typically fall into two camps: those who erroneously compare it to a household budget, and those who engage in vague pronouncements about its “impact on our children”. So one who seems to have a concrete idea of what will happen but is wrong, and one who seems not to know what the consequences will be but are worried sick about them.
The reality is that the immediate and long-term impacts of the deficit are small, and the immediate and long-term impacts of failing to invest in infrastructure and social spending are very high
What Americans should be concerned about vis. the future of our children is producing a new generation that is healthy, educated, productive, housed affordably, expanding in size, and comfortable in illness and old age. We should care about being able to get around the country fast without boiling the oceans. We should care about being able to survive natural disasters, global pandemics, terrorism, war, and resource shortages. These are all things worth creating deficit for. The adage “you have to spend money to make money” makes sense here.
In summary
I agree that we should be spending money on social support- but the failure to do both isn’t because there’s a limited amount of money we have to spend on one or the other, it’s a lack of control of the levers of power and a failure of will.
Okay, I see where you’re coming from. I agree with it too. Thank you for typing this out! (So beautifully too. I’m on mobile so expect abysmal editing and a wall of text. Sorry not sorry.) I will say that I was definitely coming from it from the perspective of “you’re allocated x number of $ to do your work.” Which, as you’re getting at, really isn’t the true issue. It’s a systemic one.
Interestingly, a lot of my “politically charged conversations” basically end up going down this path. But, how does one fix a systemic problem? Every time I try to come up with any sort of solution it basically turns to “damn I hope someone smarter than me has ideas cause mine are ‘burn it down’”.
