If you factor in health care, the United States ranks near the bottom. We savage our poor.
If you factor out health care, the United States does a little better, but the percentage of the poor, the gap between the rich and the poor is the highest in the industrialized world. We are becoming a banana republic.
America is no longer the "beacon of light" to the world. The American Dream has become a middle class nightmare, social and economic mobility have slowed to a crawl in the United States.
What happened? What happened to the beacon on the hill?
America has always had a strange inferiority complex relative to the world. We witnessed it in the 1970s, when the world began to catch up economically to American hegemony after the utter destruction of every national economy on earth save the United States.
When Japan began to challenge American car manufacturing, even slightly, Americans panicked. The push was on to out compete and beat the Japanese.
American conservatives seized on this "threat" (Japan's GDP was a fraction of the United States'), and pushed for less government regulation and tax cuts.
Ronald Reagan gleefully moved into this paranoia, pushed even more tax cuts as an economic stimulus.
Ironically, these tax cuts drastically cut government revenue and government, creating deficits that carry through to today. In the long term, this lack of revenue actually damaged the economy it did not improve it.
Meanwhile, in the 80s and 90s, the world really did catch up with the United States. Europe and a revitalized Russia, with new manufacturing infrastructure began to out compete America's aging infrastructure.
Detroit for example, stayed with large cars and trucks, while the rest of the world produced more economical models, and America became for the first time in fifty years, a second tier world car producer.
And then there was manufacturing. American manufacurers assumed their hegemony would last forever after WWII. They neglected to understand that the only reason they were number one, was the simple fact that the manufacturing sectors of Europe and Asia were destroyed by WWII. So, Americans stayed with inefficient plants, high wages via unionization, and got rich and complacent.
Meanwhile the rest of the world automated their plants, and paid less wages. They undercut American manufacturing at every turn.
And American manufacturers blamed: the workers! It was the union's fault for their inefficiency. Workers had to be cut, wages reduced, while the plants still remained pre 1950 in technology.
And America lost. Jobs were outsourced to Asian and European plants, that produced products at lower prices.
Meanwhile in America, Republicans finally had a cause to emasculate the hated New Deal. Manufacturing jobs were hemoraging, the middle class was shrinking, and who to blame, unions and big government.
And the American people, panicking as usual, bought the lies!
Of course, neither one of these were the real reason for America's "relative decline". And it was still relative. The American economy, in spite of losses, still remains today as the world largest, most innovative and strongest.
But conservatives have made a living hacking away at American's self confidence. They have reduced the social welfare safety net to one of the worst in the world. America alone in the industrialized world does not have a universal health care system.
The ACA, is being fought at every turn, by conservatives that for some reason want to reduce the one thing what can improve America's economic competitive position.
Basically, economic opportunity, that drove American exceptionalism if you will, is dying.
And the irony is this is all self inflicted. There is no reason to do this, other than feed the dilusions of the right wing. The country can afford a universal health care plan. The country can afford to educate our citizens at global competitive levels. The country can afford to build a public transportation system, an energy modernized grid; all things necessary to really compete in the global economy.
But America has one big disadvantage; its right wing of negativism and obstructionism which leads always to an unequal distribution of wealth, and an inevitable losing posture in the global economy.
The greatest threat to American economic and political leadership in the world, is the right wing movement. Its recent success in destroying the social welfare safety net, its intrangenance in fighing the Affordable Care Act will result in American slowly and painfully becoming a second rate world economic power.
The beacon on the hill is flickering.
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