You made reference to countries that are kicking our collective butts and also two hinderances to upward mobility without making the obvious connection. Both of those large expense items, education and healthcare, are fully or mostly supplied by those countries as a right of citizenship.

Many describe those countries as “socialist”, but they actually have thriving capitalist economies and many major US corporations are doing business there quite happily. I’m not sure when the concept of spending public money for public purpose became defined as socialism but it was evidently after the Constitution was ratified, as it clearly mandates that Congress “coin” the currency “for the common welfare”.

Also fairly new in our economic perspective is the idea that the government must “get” money prior to spending. Once one gets comfortable with the truth that the government holds a monopoly patent on the US dollar and that only public money created in excess of taxation can retire private sector debt, or offer a store of value for our commerce it becomes more than obvious that our current zeal for balanced budgets and minimal government with no debt is an absurd slow suicide for our nation.

It certainly doesn’t allow the level of wealth accumulation Americans view as a reward of capitalism without doing great damage to the general economy. Neither does it allow for extreme imbalances in our trade, which is also a drain of demand/currency. There is almost no condition, even a booming private sector economy and loose credit, that can sustain itself without much higher levels of deficits than we have allowed since leaving the gold standard.