America is Just About Done For

When our politicians care more about the "needs" of the richest two percent (and actually a fraction of that two percent) more than repairing the deteriorating infrastructure or helping the unemployed, you know this country is truly fucked.

It's all based on ideology. All our politicians have to do is flush Friedmanism down the toilet and reverse course, and this country could be great once again.

But these people don't want that to happen.

How did we get to this point? It’s the logical consequence of three decades of antigovernment rhetoric, rhetoric that has convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a dollar wasted, that the public sector can’t do anything right.

The antigovernment campaign has always been phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud — to checks sent to welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats uselessly pushing paper around. But those were myths, of course; there was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed. And now that the campaign has reached fruition, we’re seeing what was actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.

So the end result of the long campaign against government is that we’ve taken a disastrously wrong turn. America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere.

Or ruin.