The United States of France
Posted by Deuce Geary on February 8th, 2009
Usually, I view warnings that we are headed for socialism, like this one at Confederate Yankee, as a little over the top. But Newsweek has given me reason to reconsider:
We remain a center-right nation in many ways—particularly culturally, and our instinct, once the crisis passes, will be to try to revert to a more free-market style of capitalism—but it was, again, under a conservative GOP administration that we enacted the largest expansion of the welfare state in 30 years: prescription drugs for the elderly. People on the right and the left want government to invest in alternative energies in order to break our addiction to foreign oil. And it is unlikely that even the reddest of states will decline federal money for infrastructural improvements.
If we fail to acknowledge the reality of the growing role of government in the economy, insisting instead on fighting 21st-century wars with 20th-century terms and tactics, then we are doomed to a fractious and unedifying debate. The sooner we understand where we truly stand, the sooner we can think more clearly about how to use government in today’s world.
As the Obama administration presses the largest fiscal bill in American history, caps the salaries of executives at institutions receiving federal aid at $500,000 and introduces a new plan to rescue the banking industry, the unemployment rate is at its highest in 16 years. The Dow has slumped to 1998 levels, and last year mortgage foreclosures rose 81 percent.
All of this is unfolding in an economy that can no longer be understood, even in passing, as the Great Society vs. the Gipper. Whether we like it or not—or even whether many people have thought much about it or not—the numbers clearly suggest that we are headed in a more European direction. A decade ago U.S. government spending was 34.3 percent of GDP, compared with 48.2 percent in the euro zone—a roughly 14-point gap, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In 2010 U.S. spending is expected to be 39.9 percent of GDP, compared with 47.1 percent in the euro zone—a gap of less than 8 points. As entitlement spending rises over the next decade, we will become even more French.
One thing from the Newsweek article that really grates on me is its repeated insistence on referring to the Bush administration and the Republican congresses during his term as conservative. Grrr. Thanks a lot, big-spending Republicans!
I have an in-law from Sweden who visits twice a year, and over the years we’ve had some good-natured give-and-take over the ways in which our respective cultures and governments are better than the other. A year or two ago, he was happy to see the center-right party in Sweden get voted into power. The last visit here, he said to me — only partly in jest — that it was the first time he could say that the U.S. government was more liberal than his own. Ouch.
[...] I’ve mentioned before how my Swedish father-in-law (Swedish as in he has lived there all his life, not as in an American of Swedish descent) often chides me good-naturedly about European supremacy in this or that endeavor (see “cell phone and public wi-fi systems,” above), and even that the Swedish government is more conservative than the American one since Sweden put the center-right party in power a few years ago. But even he has noted that the younger generation in Sweden is less and less willing to work hard because so much is given to them. [...]