America is in a lot of debt. The total yearly income of the wealthiest nation on earth just about equals the amount it owes other nations. Americans would have to go more than a year without anything while working in order to pay off all the debt.
Being in debt is not the end of the world, but an inability to cease increasing the debt by a lot each year is a very bad thing, and America suffers from this malady now. If not cured, the debt growth will destroy America as we know it.
The person to blame is not the "Progess"ive who wants taxes raised enough to pay for socialist government programs. Neither is it the conservative who wants low taxes with a much smaller government. It is the median voter. The median voter isn't even a person really, nor is he a finite group of people. But he has the most power to shape aggregate voters' choices. If all Americans were made into a facial average like this one, then he would look just like this median voter.
But, we're not exactly comparing facial averages. We're saying that the final facial average of American voters ends up looking like a person who wants low taxes with plenty of socialist government benefits that have not been paid for. This person deserves to be in a high level of debt.
But why do Americans add up to this person and not another?
Maybe more people like low taxes than like small government. More like socialistic programs than like high taxes. The politicians want to win and don't want to lose doing the dignified thing.
Election politics may be to blame for this. Nobody would run on a campaign promising to eliminate public sector jobs and thus lose the public worker vote. Therefore nobody runs on a small government platform.
Nobody would run on raising taxes and thus lose the upper middle class taxpayer vote. Therefore nobody runs on a campaign of tax increases equivalent to the level of socialism he promises.
This paradigm is pictured in the graph below.
We assume that all those who want smaller government also want low taxes. We also assume that those who want higher taxes also want high levels of socialism. But not all those who want low taxes also want small government, and not all who want more freebies want higher taxes. Therefore, if a candidate moves to the left or right of point 2 in the graph and begins to talk about either scaling back government or raising taxes, he'll lose votes.
But maybe it's that people who just barely favor higher taxes--but not enough to vote for them--get energized to go out and vote by promises of more freebies; and those who like the idea of small government just a little bit but not enough to vote for someone espousing it, would vote for someone who espouses policies of low taxes.
Regardless, this thought experiment proves, perhaps sophomorically, that well-functioning democracy can result in calamity.
Sorry, we don't have data to back up this conjecture, but it may well be true.
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