Paul Krugman like many of us laments the lack of investment in our own country:
But nowadays we simply won’t invest, even when the need is obvious and the timing couldn’t be better. And don’t tell me that the problem is “political dysfunction” or some other weasel phrase that diffuses the blame. Our inability to invest doesn’t reflect something wrong with “Washington”; it reflects the destructive ideology that has taken over the Republican Party.
The ideology that you can asset strip with zero consequence, that you can enrich yourself without investment has reached almost religious certitude on the right. The ideology of the "free lunch" is strong.
And it’s all about ideology, an overwhelming hostility to government spending of any kind. This hostility began as an attack on social programs, especially those that aid the poor, but over time it has broadened into opposition to any kind of spending, no matter how necessary and no matter what the state of the economy.
They have never understood that if you concentrate wealth enough that the wealthy once they have everything the need, stop spending and merely accumulate. The economy stagnates. Yet to accumulate more in a stagnant economy lead to demands for increased productivity, lower overheads and cheaper labor. Those who actually produce see their standard of living drop, eventually they have nothing left to spend.
You can get a sense of this ideology at work in some of the documents produced by House Republicans under the leadership of Paul Ryan, the chairman of the Budget Committee. For example, a 2011 manifesto titled “Spend Less, Owe Less, Grow the Economy” called for sharp spending cuts even in the face of high unemployment, and dismissed as “Keynesian” the notion that “decreasing government outlays for infrastructure lessens government investment.” (I thought that was just arithmetic, but what do I know?) Or take a Wall Street Journal editorial from the same year titled “The Great Misallocators,” asserting that any money the government spends diverts resources away from the private sector, which would always make better use of those resources.
Yet the private sector requires an educated workforce, road, rail, bridges and communication systems to thrive.
There are a few ways of ensuring this:
1] Outsource to countries where labor is cheap and the infrastructure is in place.
2] Demand that local communities give you money and build the infrastructure for you so that you relocate there.
3] Ensure that your workforce are deeply enough in debt to make them loyal and insecure enough so as not to make demands.
4] Ensure that your workforce cannot unite in a union and threaten to relocate [see 2] if they do so.
However this asset stripping both human and environmental has physical limits unless of course you change the rules and that is where the Republican Party comes in, you start to tear down the limitations one by one. You cut taxes, turn a blind eye to tax avoidance, remove estate taxes, remove industrial standards and find other sources of national wealth to privatize, obviously social security and medicare stand out.
They have always claimed that by making the wealthy obscenely wealthy that this wealth would somehow "trickle down". This has been possibly the most nefarious ideology peddled in the last century, there is no trickle but a flood in the opposite direction. When economic catastrophe beckoned as a result of these policies those who bailed out this abusive system were those least able to afford doing so, they paid with their jobs, their pension funds, their homes and their future.
The crumbling infrastructure is a symbol of our own decline as a nation.
If the Democratic Party really wants to win then this is the battle ground, as many here know I have my doubts that they want to fight for us. However the Republican Party for decades has made it absolutely crystal clear what their intentions are and have done everything in their power to ensure that it happens by design. The reason that they hail individualism and say no to government interference is not to assist Americans to be free of government abuse, but to ensure that we are weak and divided enough to be robbed blind.