The 'American decline' is not just the fault of the rich

I've blogged recently about Baby Boomers' retirement woes, and in that post, noted that many of them were drinking the Reagan Kool-Aid 30 years ago.

Well, Der Spiegel has an in-depth article on "the decline thing," and, in a different way, it kind of makes the same point. Much of the middle class willingly believed that the pony Reagan hiomself believed had ot be near the shitpile was there.

No, Social Security isn't a Ponzi scheme, but, as Paul Kennedy could tell us from "Decline and Fall of the Great Powers," even before the housing bubble, other ways in which the U.S. economy became more and more finance-based were.

As was the outsourcing of jobs.

To riff on Martin Niemoller, "First they outsourced the unskilled industrial labor and I didn't complain. Then they outsourced the skilled industrial labor and I didn't complain. Then they oursourced the tech-skilled labor and I didn't complain. Then they outsourced gray-collar work and I didn't complain. Then they outsourced the less-skilled service labor, and I .... "

Well, with more and more call centers overseas, what next? Corporate paralegal work? India is a democracy, based on the Anglo half of Anglo-American legal principles.

At the same time, the middle class believed the Reagan undercurrent story that they should identify with the rich. Combined with the pee-down economics, it WAS class warfare in a country where everybody wants the appearance of middle-class-dom, believes the BS about mobility, lumps the upper of upper-middle class with the lower of lower-middle class, and otherwise sets itself up for sociological exploitation.

Like this, from the Spiegel story:

Sociologist Robert ... Putnam is worried about economic imbalances and new disparities within society. Today an American CEO earns about 300 times as much as an ordinary worker. In 1950, that number was only 30. The consequence is "social segregation," says Putnam, by which he means that people go to different schools and parties and live in different neighborhoods, and that there is no longer any overlap between groups.

But, again, Americans brought this on themselves.

The "ownership fetish," as in home ownership, which Spiegel discusses on its next page, is another example:
I had hoped that the Americans would change their way of thinking, that they would take responsibility and only spend as much as they made," says (Axel) Jakobeit.
Jakobeit, described as German by birth but American by choice, should have known better.

And, per Univ. of Chicago economist Raghuram Rajan, is home ownership for lower income levels a partial equivalent of "bread and circuses"? I wouldn't totally disagree, at least.

Robert Reich is on the right track:

Reich has dissected the causes of the crash in his book "Aftershock," in which he analyzes an American character trait that seems oddly simplistic: If my neighbor has more, than I want more too. And I get what I want, because I'm an American.

Spiegel's on the right track, too. Simplistic.

Germany's to cold for me. And, my German is limited. There's Canada. Or Australia. That said, if the wingnuts in the US want to talk about "ownership society," can I withdraw my Social Security contributions if I emigrate?

Unfortunately, in addition to being simplistic, American exceptionalist means the belief in the magic pony, if it's even gone that far away now, will return soon enough.

And, for Preznit Kumbaya, the magic pony to be peddled is "college education." That's even as college costs have risen, and continue to rise, far faster than inflation and slower only than healthcare costs, and we don't need that many college graduates without creative college-needing jobs.