Erza Klein questions in his Wonkblog on May 18, 2012 what is meant by “American Decline?”
“Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned,” said President Obama in his 2012 State of the Union address, “doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”
“It was a “rah-rah America!” applause line for a president who needed to get the assembled Republicans out of their seats a few times over the course of the evening. But the line works literally, too. Whenever someone tells me that the United States is in decline, I have no idea what they’re talking about. And neither, I tend to think, do they.
“The claim is maddeningly vague. What does it mean for the United States to be in decline? Are we talking about our geopolitical influence relative to other world powers? Our standard of living relative to other nations? Our current standard of living compared with some assumption about its appropriate rate of improvement?
“Let’s flip the question: What does it mean for the United States to be on the rise? If it’s growing at a perfectly respectable 3.5 percent a year while China is growing at 8.5 percent a year, enabling China’s economy to surpass the U.S. economy in a decade or so, does that mean the nation is in decline?
“My hunch is that’s how most Americans define decline. Which is a problem.”
The United States’ growth rate at 3.5 percent (exaggerated) is endemic of our failed private property capitalist system, which is structured (“rigged”) to further concentrate the monopolistic holdings of the rich under the guise that current practices will “create jobs,” –– the shallow justification for thousands of tax deductions, tax credits, tax loopholes and “tax expenditures” from politicians that achieve monopolistic access for the rich to future growth assets, future capital incomes, etc., perpetuating and increasing the ownership, power and income gaps between the top 1 percent and the poorest 99 percent of citizens.
The result is significant income inequality and inequality of economic opportunity, which, if not reformed, will result is a depression of the magnitude never experienced before. Such decline relates to all of the above. But there are solutions that will put us on a path to prosperity, opportunity, and economic justice, avoiding the catastrophe that is imminent if we continue to hold back economic growth by not broadening private, individual ownership of future productive capital assets formed by our business corporations.
In a democratic growth economy, based on Kelso’s binary economics, the ownership of productive capital would be spread more broadly as the economy grows, without taking anything away from the 1 to 10 percent who now own 50 to 90 percent of the corporate wealth. Instead, the ownership pie would desirably get much bigger and their percentage of the total ownership would decrease, as ownership gets broader and broader, also benefiting the traditionally disenfranchised poor and working and middle class. Thus, productive capital income would be distributed more broadly and the demand for products and services would be distributed more broadly from the earnings of capital and result in the sustentation of consumer demand, which will promote economic growth at rates far greater than the measly 3.5 percent cited (and greater than China’s 8.5 percent. That also means that society can profitably employ unused productive capacity and invest in more productive capacity to service the demands of a growth economy.
