Subj : Re: Recession to Depressi
To : Dr. What
From : Kaelon
Date : Thu Jul 21 2022 06:01 am
Re: Re: Recession to Depressi
By: Dr. What to Kaelon on Thu Jul 21 2022 08:40 am
> Road funding is interesting. Speaking about the Interstate road system:
> + Taxes are collected locally.
> + Sent to the Federal Gov't.
> + Who then doles it back out to the states to "maintain the Interstate" in
> their own states.
It's a very strong indictment of the quaintness of our federalist system. Our institutions have veered so far from Hamilton and Madison that the way in which the Federal Government and States interact monetarily is a profane "saving the phenomenon" that doesn't ultimately benefit constituents or citizens at any level.
> But (like here in Michigan) the governors use that money to fund social
> programs instead. And the unions suck a great deal of that money up as well
> to "fix" the roads.
In Massachusetts, like much of the Northeast, we deal with a typical inbalance. We pay far more in taxes - both locally and federally - than we receive back in services. The Federal Government redistributes income taxes collected to poorer and less developed regions of the country. Certainly, there is a legitimate "e pluribus unum" perspective to ensuring that we're all in this together to a certain extent, but there is increasingly little benefit back to New England and the Northeast for the taxes we provide.
Couple this with an increasingly authoritarian and interventionist social policy advanced by extremists on both sides of the political spectrum, and our moderate sensitivities here start looking woefully out of place in the United States.
> That's really the job of the public education system. But the Elites have
> destroyed that.
I completely agree that our sociopolitical decline began to when President Nixon's resignation left a shattered Republican Party behind that, then, corporations co-opted and, eventually, a decade later Evangelicals would forge an unholy alliance, in order to undermine the principally secular, humanistic, individualistic values. The elimination of Civics as mandatory courses in our public school system is the foundation of a lot of this rot, and all of the evils that followed - from the elimination of the fairness doctrine to usher in the junk-food of "infotainment" and elimination of fact-based news, to the corruption of our entire public education system - essentially handed over multiple generations of young minds to the Corporatists and Elitists. And now, we have a vastly stupid population that believes things like:
- Science is a lie.
- Truth is all relative.
- People cannot be trusted.
Welcome to 1984.
> Surprisingly, it seems that the USSR is poised to be the economic powerhouse
> of the future.
I am not sure that I can agree. Russia can be resurgent, there's no doubt; but it has huge geopolitical problems, chief of which is a dwindling population and a massively declining birth rate. I don't think it can present a compelling economic alternative to compete with the West, at least, not anytime soon. You rightly point out that our Strategic Defense Initiative, and other intense military spending under President Reagan, precipitated the Soviet Union's collapse. But this was possible less due to financial systematic reasons, and much more due to the limited resources available to Russia to actually marshal and harness production capabilities to match the rest of the Western Alliance.
Russia is largely a petro-chemical state. It would need at least 20-30 years to redesign its economy around a fully self-sustaining and exporting model. While Western Sanctions are giving Russia ample space to start this transformation, the ensuing brain drain of its high tech and innovative talent makes it highly unlikely that it would be able to compete with Asian Combine countries (especially Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and even troubled states like China and India) in the evolving and rapidly changing high tech sector. It will be a consumer, not a producer, in these fields, and as you've rightly pointed out, the creation of a consumerist state is the first sign that national sovereignty is being economically subjugated to foreign powers.
That subjugation is being resisted in Russia purely by relying upon the energy model of yesteryear, and it's something that Europe and North America are set to leave behind within a few years at this stage.
> I believe that matters less when many countries have missiles that can hit
> anywhere on the planet. And to be militarily dominant, you need a
> well-equiped military. But to get that, you have to have an economic engine
> capable of doing that.
>
> Remember: The USSR fell mainly because we caused them to over spend
> militarily.
I completely agree. The United States is so far ahead of the rest of the world - not just in sheer military capacity, but also in absolute military technology and innovation - that its only comparison is the Roman Imperial Order. The closest rivals that Rome faced - Parthia and farther out Han China - were over a hundred years behind on the innovation of key military technologies. So, too, can be said about China's military technology (at least 70 years behind ours), and Russia's military technology which has been hilariously demonstrated in its totally inept Ukrainian war pursuit: they are literally using the same weapons used in World War II to wage this offensive, with only nominal improvements in payload yield. So, they can only bombard their way to victory, and that is not a recipe for conquest or state-building.
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-=: Kaelon :=-
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