Counting from the time of the Korean War to the present time, this country made a fateful political decision, namely that we would spend and do whatever it takes to establish and maintain ourselves as the premier military power in the world. This, even though our sitting president at the time warned against it. It is the guns or butter choice. In macro economics, a nation has to choose between two options when spending its finite resources. It may buy either guns (invest in defense/military) or butter (invest in production of goods), or a combination of both. President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned in 1953 that “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” This is the part most often quoted, but his remarks also included this:
“The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road. the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
So here we are, 67 years later. We have the biggest and best weapons of any other nation by far. We are the world’s only superpower, and yet we are a country that is disintegrating. We have become a Third World country.
Forty percent of American families cannot afford an extraordinary expense of $400, according to a Federal Reserve report. Particularly over the past 10 years or so we have witnessed the huge growth of the so-called gig economy. The gig economy is young people in their twenties living hand-to-mouth without medical benefits and without any ability to save for the future. Indeed, they have no future and they know it.
In the wake of the death of George Floyd, the scale and intensity of the protests and violence to me indicated that something other than a response to his death and police brutality toward Black people was going on. I am convinced that most of the violence we have seen in places like Seattle and Portland and Minneapolis has less to do with police behavior toward Black people than it has to do with economic despair among the underclass. They sense that they are forever foreclosed from their share of the American Dream and they are angry.
And why are they foreclosed? Might it have anything to do with the millions of jobs that went to China in the 2007-2010 recession? Might it have something to do with the millions of HB-1 visa holders taking American jobs? Or the millions of illegal immigrants competing for low-skilled jobs?
In any event we now have a growing underclass and a permanent gilded class with an ever widening gap between. The income inequality gap is now so wide that we have instability. And this will not change if Joe Biden becomes President. He and all the politicians in Washington are oblivious to what is really going on.
• Ray Preston is a retiree who lives in Juneau. Columns, My Turns and Letters to the Editor represent the view of the author, not the view of the Juneau Empire. Have something to say? Here’s how to submit a My Turn or letter.
