Each of the 3 remaining GOP candidates paints a picture of an America that is at risk of becoming more like Europe. They portray Europe as a community in decline because of creeping socialism. America, of course, is the land of the free and the home of the brave and they want to keep it that way. They argue that the Obama administration is turning America into a declining European state that wastes tax dollars on social welfare programs that benefit the unworthy. The GOP represents the real America.
The GOP politicians are not stupid. They depend upon the ignorance and endemic nativism that prevails in their base. They are feeding their base exactly what they want to hear. It has been a disaster for American politics that one of our two major political parties is dependent upon support from a growing segment of the population that has been carefully fed a diet of misinformation about their own country and the rest of the world.
The article provides one example of the type of misinformation used by the most likely GOP nominee for the presidency. Mitt Romney is a master at lying with statistics. He tells his base that incomes are higher in the US than they are in Europe, which is true, but he does not tell them about the growing share of their income that is needed to pay for healthcare and to send their kids to college. These are regarded as public goods in most of Europe and are paid for with tax dollars. Moreover, we could learn a lot from the way in which Germany has protected its highly competitive manufacturing sector from mass unemployment. We could also learn from those "terrible" Nordic states that have avoided the US sponsored financial crisis and are able to grow their economies without increasing income inequality.
No comments:
Post a Comment