| It seems like a middle-class existence should still be quite trivial to provide for most Americans. We can afford universal healthcare, but we can't afford a system of for-profit insurers, unconstrained pricing, non-negotiated drug pricing, emergency room doctors being "contractors" to some shady out of state/out of network racket etc. We can easily afford to send a large majority of our "top" students to colleges for free, but we insist that everyone needs to go to college, no matter the academic ability. We also allow universities to use this "free money" to create degree programs with no job prospects in order to grow universities for no other reason than to make more money, at the expense of the younger generations. There is a shortage of skilled tradesmen and tradeswomen due to this, and of course the "solution" is yet another cry for more immigration. We already have a large amount of struggling poor Americans we don't take care of, but we insist on programs that do nothing except subsidize very specific connected and powerful lobbies (tech, farming, etc.) Both republicans and democrats support this. Republicans have always supported the black hole of funding that is the farm lobby, and Democrats have recently given up the blue-collar unions to focus on immigration. I'm unclear why, but this campaign has been extraordinarily successful. At the end of the day, all of the above causes the market to go up, until it doeesn't anymore. Any change in policy would most likely crush the market in the short-term but would potentially be a start at trying to fix endemic issues. I guess we can't have the market go down though. That'd make the boomers mad. |