I heard Congressman Jason Chafetz, (R -Utah) interviewed on TV today. He did the usual negative Republican song-and-dance abouty taxes, but made one comment that made me perk up.
He stated that the U.S. was "one tax cut away from prosperity." Not that the sentiment isn't Repub boilerplate, but the way he said it struck a cord. Thinking about it, I realized that prosperity isn't the issue in the United States. We are far from destitute. We are a long way from becoming a failed state. We are not even on the brink of economic calamity.
There is lots of "prosperity" in the U. S. The problem is that all the "prosperity" has concentrated in the hands of a minute few. A small number of people, proportionately, have managed to amass greater wealth than anyone could have imagined a few decades ago. Their wealth has grown by leaps and bounds. The problem is not the lack of "prosperity," but the lack of access to it by the 99%. There is, and has been since 1945, plenty for everyone in an ever expanding economy. What changed is who benefits from this growth and who ends up left in the dust.
That the U. S. has the highest incarceration rate in the "Developed" world, the highest, or one of the highest, poverty rates and is near, or at, the bottom of the list in social and economic mobility should make everyone upset and angry. That kind of "exceptionalism" should be the stuff of social movements, or dare I say, revolution? In South America and Europe people go into the streets and raise their voices (and bang pots and pans) but the silence in the streets of America is deafening.
The journalist, author and social commentator, Studs Terkel, had a deep understanding of the American "national character." He said in one interview about his book about the 1930's (Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression . New Press, 2005) that people who were faced with disaster, when the factory closed and they were out of work, tended to blame themselves for their situation, when they had done nothing but work hard all their lives, as if the closing was their own personal failure.
That certainly plays to the cynical right-wing, inspired by Ayn Rand, who seem to have convinced a lot of people that they are the authors of their own fate, and not the victims of a corrupt system.
We are, in fact, "one tax cut away from prosperity," or, perhaps, "more prosperity," except it will be more prosperity for the prosperous, and another bucket of ashes for the rest of us.