Thinking about the political scene right now elicits anxiety. My state of Illinois is in major gridlock. This is having profound effects locally. Case in point, in Galesburg, summer school for elementary children has been eliminated as has the breakfast and lunch program that children depend on for nourishment. At the federal level, the US government has been in gridlock for most of President Obama’s tenure and arguably for most of the Bush (#2) era. Amidst all of this governmental logjam, it is understandable that many are becoming frustrated, particularly those that understand that government, when functioning well, can do wonderful things–such as, providing care for the downtrodden, a high level of education to its people, and efficient and accessible transportation for all. With all of these programs hemorrhaging, many people are hurting unnecessarily.
Those of us that live in the United States are told repeatedly that we live in the freest and most prosperous nation in the world. Some statistics compel us to believe this. Among nations with more than 25 million people, of which there are 49 (in 2015), the USA has the highest GDP (gross national product) per capita. Yet, other figures clearly demonstrate it as wishful thinking. Consider, the US, home to less than 5% of the world’s people, houses ~25% of the world’s prisoners (ref 1). Additionally, childhood poverty in the US is among the highest (if not the highest) among industrialized nations (ref 2, ref 3). How could this be?
Let me inject a new law of conservation to shed light on this. The Law of the Conservation of Money (LCM), an idea that I hereby make up (but apparently has esoteric roots elsewhere), says that money always goes somewhere, it doesn’t disappear. So, if “America’s wealth grew by 60 percent in the past six years, by over $30 trillion [… and,] in approximately the same time, the number of homeless children has also grown by 60 percent” (ref 2), we can see the source of the problem–the continued misdistribution of money. In Illinois, we hear powerful leaders talk about how we don’t have money for X or Y (where X and Y are often critical programs that keep the underclass alive). But the answer to where our money went doesn’t take “rocket science” to determine. Among key drivers, look no further than IL’s extremely regressive tax structure (5th worst in the U.S., see ref 4). Yet, is there a state leader (who receives any media attention) who points to this obvious source of our economic woes? I don’t know of one. We will not make much progress until we identify where our riches went.
(to be continued)