So What Exactly Should Be The Size and Role of Government in the United States?

What should be the size and role of government?

The current picture of the United States is as follows: the nation as of the 2010 Census is inhabited by 311 million people, with 46 million Americans falling below the poverty line as of 2011 (granted the 14.3% of Americans living in poverty in 2010 is nowhere near the 22% that lived in poverty in 1960), with the top 20% controlling over 80% of the wealth as of 2007 (with the top 1% controlling 40% of it), and with the top 10% of income earners pulling in nearly half the wages paid out in the United States as of 2007. The latter two statistics haven't been seen since World War I.  Middle class wages have largely stagnated and reports have sprung out that they have begun to drop; upper class wages have slightly dropped as well, but middle class erosion is at ten times the velocity of the upper class.

It's not too surprising -- the American ideal is that if you work hard and become successful you should be able to reap the rewards from it. That's a fair argument, however, any rewards that you reap are at the expense of others. Elizabeth Warren is right -- no one in this country got rich by themselves. However, as the rich get richer, they are able to retain more of it and expand on it for that they can weather any increase in the cost of living to a degree that no one in the shrinking middle class can. Besides, the wealthy retains their purchasing power, despite their high tax rate (which remains lower than the peaks of the mid-20th century when it reached as high as 80-90% for millionaires, however, then just like now, despite the heavy taxation they still had more purchasing power than the majority swath of the population).

It is a consequence of the greatest peace time expansion  in history back in the 1990s -- income did increase for Americans in the 1990s, however, cost of living increased faster, causing more and more middle class Americans to rely on credit, which caused more and more Americans to fall into debt when more and more Americans reached their limits in credit. Combine that with the emergence of the global marketplace, new technologies to replace labor, and companies realizing they can retain more earnings by paying less for labor by outsourcing it, ended up slowing down consumption. A downturn in consumption affects the middle class more than anybody because it is these wage and salary earners in the middle class that need the rest of the middle class to keep them employed.

As a consequence, its led to the expansion of the welfare state. Welfare spending has increased by 160%, nominally, in the years between 2001 and 2011; an illustration of an expanding role of government. Of course, the US population over that time period only grew by 10%. Numerous things lead to increased welfare expenditures, all of them well publicized to the point that I don't really need to repeat every single last one of them; but this is going to be continuously the reality of a country with disparity this bad.

Yes, it does seem like I have digressed to what I originally set out to discuss, but I have not -- this has everything to do with the role of government, because as much as middle class American despise and distrust the government, middle class Americans will turn to it because the middle class truly believes the challenges that they are facing currently are bigger than them. Americans don't necessarily want to pay for it, but they'll turn to it. And, as the vast majority of Americans see more and more of their collective wealth erode, they're going to raise their expectations as to how government should conduct themselves, and then react in anger when they do not feel that government is serving its purpose. It's always been like that. With the advent of the Internet and 24 hour news media, we're just a whole hell of a lot more aware of it.

Americans want the government to solve the health care issue. Americans want government to improve infrastructure. Americans want government to come up with a solution to the economy. Americans want government to ensure that when they get old, frail, and can't work, government will be there to provide them their safety net in income. If it was not the case, Americans would advocate for the dissolution of the three major entitlement programs, would not care if roads fell into disrepair or goods would not be able to efficiently move across the country, and Americans would chant for lassiez-faire economics until it makes a Democrat bleed to death from the ears. Americans aren't, no matter how loud the Tea Party is purported to be.

Yet, at the same time, we're debating what should be the size and role of government. What can be agreed on is that government should be there to ensure individual liberty. Believe it or not, that's actually the basic tenet of American liberalism (which, for example, if pop liberals are to truly adhere to true liberal philosophy then they would actually support gun rights). So, in theory, at least in my mind, the size and role of government should be proportional to what is necessary to ensure the individual liberties of 311 million Americans.

Not every American can elevate themselves up the class ladder and escape poverty. Not every American is going to be well enough to take care of themselves. This is a capitalist system: there are bound to be winners and losers, those that make money and those that don't. There will be those that will be self-sufficient and self-inefficient. There will be those that will be stuck depending on the government for an extended period of time because unfortunately they fell through the cracks. Long story short, there are those that cannot help the disadvantaged position that they have put in and in truth, that is the collective truth that makes up the lower middle class and the lower class that waddles in poverty.

But what constitutes individual liberty? The right to health care? The right to own guns? The right for government not to tax the living shit out of you even though taxation is actually necessary? The right to not infringe on your privacy? The right for you as a middle class American not to have your livelihood assaulted by the private sector that has proven not to be able to behave itself? Is it the right to even having a middle class? Do the lower class, especially the ones that cannot help their position, have a right to have a decent life provided to them by the government? And I could go on and on. I could further drivel into government's role in the economy, but I'll save that for another day.

I'm going to get to the whole point of this post: Americans -- from the constituency to the politicians -- have no collective fucking clue about what's the optimal government proportion of size and role to population. That's why you have two different political parties warring over ideology in Washington. It's why you have four predominant schools of political philosophical thought. It's why Sean Hannity has a career. It's why Fox News and MSNBC have regressed themselves into being ideological news outlets. It's why you're pissed at Bush, why you're pissed at Obama, and why we keep debating who's better out of Reagan and Clinton. That's why we have the current political climate and class warfare.

**Note: If you're wondering I didn't go on and on about how the wealthy factor into this it's simple: if there's a 80%/20% in split in wealth held by a 20%/80% split in the population, respectively, with a further 1%/99% split among that 20%, it's obvious that the wealthy are in the driver's seat.