A German view of America 2010
When I studied for an economics master’s degree — while playing squash, drinking warm beer and training for the Paris Marathon… it was a great year! — at the London School of Economics for a year in the early 1990s, students from around the world helped reshape my view of America. Learning how others view your country is an eye-opener. So I present Germany’s Der Spiegel’s perspective on America today:
The United States of 2010 is dysfunctional, but in new ways. The entire interplay of taxes and investments is out of joint because a 16,000-page tax code allows for far too many loopholes and because solidarity is no longer part of the way Americans think. The political system, plagued by lobbyism and stark hatred, is incapable of reaching consistent or even quick decisions.
The country is reacting strangely irrationally to the loss of its importance — it is a reaction characterized primarily by rage. Significant portions of America simply want to return to a supposedly idyllic past. They devote almost no effort to reflection, and they condemn cleverness and intellect as elitist and un-American, as if people who hunt bears could seriously be expected to lead a world power. Demagogues stir up hatred and rage on television stations like Fox News. These parts of America, majorities in many states, ignorant of globalization and the international labor market, can do nothing but shout. They hate everything that is new and foreign to them….
[Economist and former Secretary of Labor Robert] Reich [says] the wind is blowing from three directions. The rich keep getting richer, with the top 0.1 percent of income earners making more money than the 120 million people at the bottom of the income scale. The rich, says Reich, are trying to buy the elections. Meanwhile, the government is not helping the poor, and in fact is telling them: There’s no money left for you. It is human nature to want what others have, says Reich, but the real problem is that people aren’t making enough money, and that America’s wealth is concentrated within the small upper class.
All of this is making radicals more vocal. “I think what we’re seeing now in America is an outbreak of isolationism, nativism and xenophobia,” Reich says, pointing toward animosity toward immigrants, accusations against China and growing skepticism of foreign trade….
In the last decade, the population grew by 25 million, but there were no new jobs, or at least no net job creation. But a minimum of 100,000 new jobs a month was needed just to serve those who wanted to enter the job market….
Two wars, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, had already cost the country $1 trillion [by January 2006]. The government debt continued to grow, from 57 percent of GNP in 2000 to 83 percent when Obama took office in 2009. The current national debt of $13.8 trillion amounts to 94.3 percent of GNP, and in two years it will exceed 100 percent….
In 1978, the average income for men in the United States was $45,879. In 2007, it was $45,113, adjusted for inflation…. Total US household debt is now approaching $14 trillion, which is 20 times as much as in the 1970s….
The United States of 2010 is a country that has become paralyzed and inhibited by allowing itself to be distracted by things that are, in reality, not a threat: homosexuality, Mexicans, Democratic Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, health care reform and Obama. Large segments of the country are not even talking about the issues that are serious and complex, like debt, unemployment and serious educational deficits….
Each state elects two senators, including Wyoming, with its 540,000 inhabitants, and California, with a population of 37 million. If enough senators from states with small populations band together, they have the capacity to block everything, which is precisely what they do.
Posted by James on Monday, November 08, 2010