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Jewish World Review July 8, 2011 / 6 Tamuz, 5771 Is decline of U.S. exaggerated? By Jay Ambrose
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Reports of his death, Mark Twain once humorously said, were greatly exaggerated. And so are reports of America's decline.
But there's an obvious difference. Death is final and definitive and has either happened or it hasn't, which means you cannot really exaggerate it. Decline is a process, and even when dismal predictions go overboard, they can be plausible enough not to be funny.
One shut-up-and-smile response is to point to some encouraging facts. Pre-recession, the International Labor Organization reported that an American worker left every other nation in the dust in wealth produced per year ($63,885), and came in second only to Norway in wealth produced per hour. For more than 100 years, we have manufactured more goods than anyone else in the world,.
Yet isn't the middle class shrinking? Yes. Guess why. As economist Stephen Rose has led the way in reporting, it is shrinking because so many are graduating, not because they are dropping out. Just a few years ago, he was writing how the numbers in households enjoying $100,000 and more a year had leapt from 12 percent to 24 percent in the past quarter century while there was no jump in households making under $30,000.
There's more good, such as the possibilities of free trade lifting us to new economic heights, but whoa. Let's look at the other side, starting with how lots of American politicians do not understand trade -- how every job lost to industries that do better overseas than here is replaced (and then some) in industries that do better here than overseas. They don't understand how trade combats inflation and saves families huge amounts of money each year.
They may do us terrible harm, consequently, and meanwhile, President Barack Obama and Democratic chums are making their political living disrespecting all businesses, big and small. We desperately need jobs, and their answer is to punish the chief supplier of those jobs -- small businesses -- with higher taxes on the owners.
That's just for starters, because Obama just cannot stop denigrating our corporations even though, without them, we would be a Third World kind of place. If big is what worries you, worry most about government that also has the coercive power to take your money whether you want to give it or not. Corporations cannot force you to buy their products, but your government right now wants to force you to buy health insurance on penalty of offending Obama, along with a fine.
Please, please remember that as much as Wall Street misplayed its hand in the financial crisis, it was government that took us there, pressuring banks to extend mortgage loans to people who could not afford them, as one means.
There's lots more: an administrative state that is now more in control of our lives than any past generation could have dreamed of and is stifling entrepreneurship while providing a huge percentage of us with large portions of our income so that we look to it more and more for succor. This administrative state has run up a debt that could produce economic mayhem of a kind the recession only hinted at. At the same time, we have a retiring secretary of defense telling us he does not want to be part of a government stepping back from engagement with the world.
Don't look too closely at the citizenry because then you'll see a genuine crisis of unwed motherhood that largely cheats children of a chance in life.
Let's stop before we make the case that there really is no exaggerating the decline. There is truly much that remains good and there are ways of halting that which endangers us, including elections and community leadership.
We're still a spunky place. Let's do our thing.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. Comment by clicking here. Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado.
• 07/05/11: Not math deficiency, but demagoguery
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