Fellow Kossaks who have read my diaries and comments know that I am of the mind that there is not much difference between the Republican and Democratic parties on matters of economic policy - the leaders of both parties are basically oriented toward their corporatist and Wall Street funders, and committed to the implementation and continuation of the neo-liberal policies of free trade, privatization, austerity, no enforcement of anti-trust, no dismantling of the TBTF banks, and domination by the FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) sectors over the rest of the economy.
Well, this morning, trying to find some updated graphs for a presentation, I came across an issue where the difference between between the Republican and Democratic parties is clear, dramatic, and unmistakable. Folks, I give you:
US investment in infrastructure as a percent of gross domestic product, with each President since Kennedy highlighted.
This graph is from "Game-Changing Investments for the U.S.," by Laura D'Andrea Tyson and Susan Lund, in the New York Times, October 18, 2013. I added the vertical red lines demarcating each President, and the names of the Presidents.
It is very clear that Democratic Presidents invest much more in America than Republican Presidents do.
But, also note the trendline over time is toward less and less spending on infrastructure. This is a very bad trend, because we literally have trillions of dollars in infrastructure we need to repair and build.
The graph immediately below is the funding gap we are falling into just by failing to maintain and repair our existing infrastructure, according to the 2013 reports by the American Society of Civil Engineers, Failure to Act: The Impact of Current Infrastructure Investment on America's Economic Future.
The grim truth is that two to four trillion is actually just a very small fraction of what we need to invest in infrastructure in the coming years. McKinsey Global Institute has calculated that the world needs a minimum of $57 trillion in infrastructure spending over the next fifteen years, just to keep up with expected economic and population growth. Here is a section of page from the January 2013 report by McKinsey Global Institute, Infrastructure productivity: How to save $1 trillion a year,
And just so you know: take a look at what Republican budget meister / austerity ghoul Paul Ryan would like to do to infrastructure spending.
This graph is from "Data Lab: Charting decline in US public spending," by Robin Harding and Russell Birkett, in the Financial Times, November 3, 2013.
Even the proposed spending by the Progressive Caucus is not enough to reverse the negative trends, let along begin to address real needs.
And here's the doozy: what we need to seriously address climate change, according to a report in Scientific American in November 2009.
$100 trillion.
Yes, you read that right: one hundred trillion dollars.
That amount may seem preposterous - but only because we have internalized the decades of propaganda promoting neo-liberalism by the one percent and the banksters. It is actually well within our capability, considering that the entire world economy produces around $71 trillion in goods and services each year (of which the U.S. economy produces around $16 trillion). $100 trillion over 15 years is just under $7 trillion a year. That's just a ten percent increase in world output, right now! That would make for the longest sustained world economic boom since the rebuilding of Europe and Japan after World War Two.
And remember, the financial markets in the USA alone trade over $5 trillion each and every day in stocks. bonds, options, futures, swaps, and other derivatives. Now, that is not the amount of money that changes hands every day, because much of it is leveraged, and many instruments are counted at nominal value (for example, to buy a futures contract on $10 million in exchange rates between the dollar and the Euro may be around $100,000 or so), but it still gives you some idea of the huge amounts of money Wall Street, Chicago (futures) and the City of London (bigger than Wall Street and Chicago combined) play with every day in their high-tech, exclusive speculative casinos, while the world is screaming for investment in infrastructure.
And, there is over $50 trillion sitting around in the world's offshore hot money centers, which the one percent are hiding from tax authorities. To fund $100 trillion in new infrastructure we can either take that money away from the one percent, or take away their control over the creation and allocation of new money and credit, which they are misusing for speculation and usury. Or some combination of the two actions.
We can create $100 trillion in new money and credit any damn time we want to. Out of thin air, if we want to. The real fight is over who controls the process, and how much "profit" they are allowed to extract from the process. Right now, the process seems to me to be hopelessly corrupted, debased, and malformed, by the addiction to speculation, usury, and rent extraction by the rich and the banksters. But $100 trillion is what we need to ensure the survival of our species.
And it's not really all that much - when we can create the money out of thin air any time we want.