Reading this for reading club. The first chapter makes for depressing reading. The book details how we got to this mess. Some quotes from the beginning, re the current state of the United States:
"Income inequality has snowballed. Adjusted for inflation, middle-class wages have been nearly frozen for the last four decades, and discretionary income has declined if escalating out-of-pocket health care costs and insurance premiums are counted. Yet earnings by the top one percent have nearly tripled. The recovery from the crash of 2008—which saw banks and bankers bailed out while millions lost their homes, savings, and jobs—was reserved almost exclusively for the top one percent. Their incomes in the three years following the crash went up by nearly a third, while the bottom 99 percent saw an up-tick of less than half of one percent. Only a democracy and an economy that has discarded its basic mission of holding the community together, or failed at it, would produce those results.
"The world’s richest country continues to have the highest poverty rate among the thirty-five nations in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), except for Mexico. (It is tied in second to last place with Israel, Chile, and Turkey.) Nearly one in five of America’s children live in households that their government classifies as “food-insecure,” meaning they are without “access to enough food for an active, healthy life.”
"Beyond that, few of the basic services seem to work as they should. America’s airports are an embarrassment, and a modern air traffic control system is twenty-five years behind schedule. The power grid, roads, and rails are crumbling, pushing the United States far down international rankings for infrastructure quality. Despite spending more on health care and K–12 education per capita than any other developed country, health care outcomes and student achievement also rank in the middle or worse internationally. The U.S. has the highest infant mortality rate and lowest life expectancy among its peer countries, and among the thirty-five OECD countries American children rank thirtieth in math proficiency and nineteenth in science."
"American politicians talk about “American exceptionalism” so habitually that it should have its own key on their speechwriters’ laptops. Is this the exceptionalism they have in mind? The operative word to describe the performance of our lawmakers in Washington, D.C., responsible for guiding what is supposed to be the world’s greatest democracy, is pathetic. Congress has not passed a comprehensive budget since 1994. Like slacker schoolchildren unable to produce a book report on time, the country’s elected leaders have fallen back instead on an endless string of last-minute deadline extensions and piecemeal appropriations. Legislation to deal with big, long-term challenges, like climate change, the mounting national debt, or job displacement, is a pipe dream. It is as if the great breakthroughs of the past, marked by bipartisan signing ceremonies in the White House—the establishment of the Federal Trade Commission, Social Security, interstate highways, the Food and Drug Administration, Medicare, civil rights legislation, the EPA—are part of some other country’s history. There are more than twenty registered lobbyists for every member of Congress. Most are deployed to block anything that would tax, regulate, or otherwise threaten a deep-pocketed client. Money has come to dominate everything so completely that those we send to Washington to represent us have been reduced to begging on the phone for campaign cash four or five hours a day and spending their evenings taking checks at fund-raisers organized by those swarming lobbyists."
"The result is a new, divided America. On one side are the protected few—the winners—who don’t need government for much and even have a stake in sabotaging the government’s responsibility to all of its citizens. For them, the new, broken America works fine, at least in the short term. On the other side are the unprotected many, who rely on government, as they always have, to protect and preserve their way of life and maybe even improve it. That divide is the essence of America’s tailspin. The protected overmatched, overran, and paralyzed the government."
Steven Brill's resume: Steven Brill (born August 22, 1950) is an American lawyer and journalist-entrepreneur who founded monthly magazine The American Lawyer and the cable channel Court TV, and is the author of the best selling, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America’s Fifty-Year Fall – and Those Fighting to Reverse It. (From Wikipaedia)
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