People who are independently wealthy have very little need for government services; they’d be happy to do their DMV stuff through AAA, hire private police, retain the exclusive services of a doctor, self-insure their hospitalization, etc etc.

Government costs at the national level are largely Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, and national defense, all $800B/yr each.

Demographics drive the first two strongly. Since the 1960s we’ve been riding the wave of the baby boom essentially pre-paying their future medicare and social security payouts, this has allowed the government to tax the larger economy less, especially after Reaganism took over.

But now that the baby boom is hitting 65 en masse, it’s coming time to reverse this and raise taxes back to what they need to be to pay for everything — like Japan, Gen Y is in no shape to produce the continued economic growth required to pension off their parents.

This is what the battles are all about — that $2.7T currently sitting in the social security trust fund. That’s money that was taxed out of the wage-earning economy that the 1% now have to start paying back, but these moneyed interests have been erecting their defenses against this coming extraction for decades now.

Romney pays 14% in taxes; for our economy to work this has to be more like 40%.

But the 1% have created a large amount of useful idiots to make the fight for them.

And I don’t think this is winnable.

By 2030, social security, medicare, and medicaid + PPACA subsidies are going to double the costs are now, meaning even higher taxation on everyone, especially the top 10% who make ~45% of the income.

Felix Salmon has made the argument than I’m thinking, here:

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/10/16/barack-obama-vs-zombies/

This is not actually Obama vs. Tea Party. It is Democrats vs. Republicans, Centrists vs. Conservatives.

The Democrats raised taxes in 1991-1993, and the electorate kindly threw them out of office for that insult. Without tax rises, this nation is just going to borrow our way into the deep hole that Japan is in now, but with the difference that we’ll owe much of that money to our trade partners.

There’s just too many stupid people here.

There is a kernel of “truth” in the other side; they don’t want to pay for other people’s needs. That’s the essence of “got mine screw you” conservatism.

The USA is not Sweden or any other euro-soc ialist country of 5 to 10M largely homogenous folk who’ve been a community since recorded history began. We’ve got tens of millions of dependent ex-immigrant and minority populations that have been historically shit on by the white majority.

Now that the wheel’s starting to turn and the majority is the largest minority, things are going to get complicated to resolve.

We’re spending $60B/yr alone on food aid:

http://www.fns.usda.gov/pd/34snapmonthly.htm

to 23M households, one out of 5 households.

Rural conservatives can sit on their 100-1000 acres of productive land and afford to vote Republican nihilism, because by owning productive natural wealth they don’t need to be directly dependent on Big Government, they’ve got the land working for them.

If everyone could secure 500 productive acres of land, nobody would need to be on food aid, or much of any aid at all.

But that’s not how the present economy is structured — like Japan, there’s not enough land wealth to go around. Japan solved that problem by creating an export economy in the last century, and they were spectacularly successful, but largely at the US’s expense.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/MANEMP

brutal.

So without land, or manufacturing jobs, what’s left?

Bullshit service sector jobs and government redistributive aid!

But even the service sector requires consumers to have money to spend, and what nobody understands all that well now is that the working classes face enormous rent taps in all areas of life, especially housing ($8000/capita), but also health care (about the same) and energy ($4000/household).

Much of this money is sheer highwaymanry that is pulling trillions out of the paycheck economy and not putting it back as wages.

This is what I meant when I said above Romney needs to pay 40% and not 14% for our economy to work.

Romney’s millions of income is not flowing from outer space, it is coming from our paycheck economy. What has been taken out must be put back in!

This is what nobody understands. In economics there is a radical left-ish idea that the government should stop borrowing and start printing (MMT)

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-02-18/business/35442562_1_john-kenneth-galbraith-budget-surplus-economists

but this is also ignorant of the asymmetric flows in the economy.

Even Obama has to defend the idea of ever-escalating cost of living in housing. Voters own homes, and want their homes to go up in value, not down.

I expect Luis feels the same now that he’s an owner too.

That’s how The System has corrupted us. The 1% own 40%. The 10% own 20%. The next 20% own 20% or whatever. We all are invested enough to fight change that hurts us.

This allows the broken system to continue, as the masses lack the strength at the polls to get more left-radicals into power.

And thanks to the mass brainwashing that’s been going on, we’re actually seeing more rightwing nutjob radicals than left. Ted Cruz gets all the oxygen in the Senate, all the left has in response is that nice man, Bernie Sanders.

Not going to be enough!

There’s more money to be made defending our corrupt system than fighting to reform it.

A nation of fools.