*** Americas Race to the Bottom. *** “What makes America the greatest country in the world?” asks a fresh-faced college girl after stepping up to the microphone. The panelist pauses. He fiddles in his seat. After a long career as a purveyor of “truth,” his whole being resists the impulse to lie. But his innate graciousness tells him to avoid veracity this time. Then … under pressure from the moderator … he cracks. “It’s not the greatest country in the world. That’s my answer.” The room is stunned, silent. But it’s too late. Many of you will recognize this iconic scene from HBO’s The Newsroom. Although the characters are fictional, the facts are not. They are entirely correct and I can tell you why … Dropping From First to Third World The United States has fallen behind in nearly every measure imaginable. The so-called greatest country in the world is now third in median household income, number four in labor force, number four in exports, seventh in literacy, 22nd in science, 27th in math, 34th in infant mortality and 35th in life expectancy. Would you like to know what we are first in? The U.S. is first in health care spending but 35th in life expectancy. We’re first in the number of incarcerated citizens per capita. We’re first in defense spending. In 1962, at a reelection rally in Ohio for my good friend, the late Congressman John Ashbrook, I first heard Ronald Reagan give “The Speech,” as it came to be known. Citing Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Reagan added: “The average age of the world’s great civilizations has been 200 years.” The evening I heard Reagan utter those words, America was yet to celebrate its 200th birthday — now we are in the 238th year of our independence. The United States has long since ceased to be the “greatest” at anything — anything laudable, that is. By most measures, we’re rapidly sliding toward Third World status, although in some respects, such as our governance, we’re already there. Indeed, if you’re an American, you’re living in a country that now ranks 12th in the Heritage Foundation’s annual Index of Economic Freedom. Not even in the top 10. Ireland and the tiny Indian Ocean state of Mauritius outrank us. And the United States, once a “shining city on a hill” illumining a dark world with our practice of liberty, is now considered a bad example by Human Rights Watch. The group’s most recent report worries that “governments with poor human rights records may try to follow in America’s footsteps,” justifying their repression of citizen’s rights by citing our own. Indeed, my son Ted, who lived in southern Africa for many years, recalls Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe explaining his draconian “terrorism” laws by saying: “after all, the U.S. does the same thing.” Indeed we do: Detention without trial, extrajudicial killing, seizures of assets without any crime having been committed or sentence pronounced. Nice company to be in. Those of us who restrict our gaze to the day-to-day affairs of the United States have failed to notice the incremental reductions in our liberty. But when you make a habit of surveying conditions in other countries regularly, as I do, the rapidly deteriorating conditions in the U.S. are thrown into sharp relief. For example, did you know that the top individual federal income tax rate in the U.S. is 39.6%, whereas in Switzerland it’s 11.5%? Or that in Singapore, tax revenues make up 13.8% of the total domestic economy, whereas in the U.S., it’s 25.1%? Or that Chile’s public price supports for agriculture comprise less than 5% of total farm receipts — one of the lowest among OECD countries — whereas the figure for the U.S. is 34%? I could go on to cite many more examples, but you get the picture. Americans are overregulated and overtaxed. The money taken from us is being used to build even more regulatory capacity, shovel out favors to business sectors with powerful lobbies, sustain the ranks of the unemployed (which is at an all-time high), and to maintain and operate an imperial system of global military intervention and surveillance. H/T Former Rep. Bob Bauman, JD.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Feb 2014 03:01:37 +0000
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