Americans vote down the basic public goods which they desperately need because they’ve become too poor to afford them.
This is only because they believe that their tax dollars fund the public goods they so sorely need to improve their lives. Americans have a very shallow understanding of macroeconomics and see their government’s spending as a cost to the economy instead of the only source of the currency that it is.
You correctly cite the ’70s as the turning point. That was when the left abandoned the working class and ended all resistance to the horrible fallacy of trickle-down economics. Reagan took advantage of America’s econ ignorance and racism to defeat a weak President and a party that was as united as a herd of cats. The left, without the ability to counter the econ nonsense of conflating the national government’s spending with that of the voter’s kitchen table budgeting, was relegated to splinter groups focussed on social issues and environmental extremists.
Clinton won the Presidency by effectively running to the right of Eisenhower while barely staying left of Reagan by design. His economics were sophomoric and starved the economy of its lifeblood currency while the tech bubble drove people deeply into private debt to fund their own economy and the surplus the left is still touting proudly. Keynes advocated for building a surplus in good economic times, but did so under the restrictions of the gold standard. Such restraint is no longer necessary as FDR rescinded the convertibility of the currency to gold domestically in ’34, making the US dollar self-funding and taxing for revenue obsolete.
If Americans ever discover how their government funds beneficial programs and infrastructure with a fiat sovereign currency both political parties will lose all economic credibility. The limit to federal spending has always been the resources the dollars are deployed to purchase, not the amount of deficits or the faux national debt that isn’t even a debt the people are responsible for. We can have all of the benefits other countries take for granted by simply electing people who understand that they don’t have to be “paid for’ via taxation or borrowing. The misery of austerity that America has come to be known for is entirely a political decision, not sound economics.
