Competition for public funds 26 May 201126 May 2011 Ever wondered why education, research, health care and public infrastructure is being wound back across the western world? This chart, from here, on the American debt, suggests why: In the competition between various calls on the public purse, it looks like the military and the plutocracy have won out. We don’t always think of what is happening in the “democratic” west as being a militaristic and robber baron society, but on these sorts of figures, it looks like it. Politics
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Actually, the military looks like a relatively small part of it. The biggest factor is the Bush tax cut, which I suppose is what you’re counting as “plutocracy”. Second to that is the economy, stupid, which may be the fault of the plutocrats, but doesn’t make it seem as if they’re winning, especially. TARP, etc., is almost nothing. Wars are the third factor, but a distant third.
What’s happening with the U.S. Federal budget, in the short run, is that the annual shortfall in tax revenue (and the additional welfare burdens) due to the recession will flatten out and eventually decline to zero; the economic stimuluses will end over a few years and thenceforth cost nothing; the TARP, Fannie/Freddie, auto industry and other bailouts will end up costing the budget virtually nothing (because, despised they may be, bailouts always work as intended); and the costs of our foreign adventures should level out and thus take a smaller percentage of the GDP as the economy grows (though why we should continue to pay for a military designed to such a degree to fight another superpower is another matter). As the chart shows, due to the Bush tax cuts our fiscal system will be structured such that, not only will we be unable to pay for what we wish to buy, but that the shortfall in tax revenue will actually accelerate, even assuming the economy returns to health growth. In the long run, past the scope of the chart, the deficit will continue to be driven mainly by these same tax cuts, until the 2030s, when the budget will become dominated by the costs of medical care, as reflected in Medicare and Medicade. Here perhaps plutocracy may be again evoked, as no other rich country is likely to have these problems so manifestly, given their willingness to adopt economically sound tax and medical systems.