One stubborn problem is that US voters want a lot of healthcare but don’t want to pay for it. Yet maintaining the healthcare services and entitlement programs that we have today will require more money. There’s just no way around it.
In order to get the revenue you need, you are going to have to convince both parties to compromise on issues that both have sworn never to compromise on. And proposing traditional compromises in the current political environment is simply not going to work. You can try until you’re blue in the face, but nothing will happen, and we’ll lurch toward a truly fundamental economic crisis that all the infrastructure spending in the world won’t fix.
So let’s step entirely outside the box and figure out how to give both parties something they want so badly that to get it they’ll be willing to compromise on what the other party wants. And we have to do this in such a way that the bulk of the American people see a significant improvement in their lives and in their paychecks.
To craft a solution, let’s look first at what has happened to the average American worker. There is a reason that large numbers of voters in both parties are frustrated. The charts that follow tell better than 1000 words could why that frustration is warranted. For all the crowing about how quantitative easing has helped, it has mostly helped Wall Street and the top 20% of earners. Median income in the United States is down 8.5% since 2000.
The median net worth of US families has fallen sharply since 2007 and is roughly back to where it was 24 years ago:
And that economic malaise is affecting all education groups. Even those with advanced degrees have seen their incomes stagnate since 2007:
And while incomes have stagnated, the real cost of goods and services has increased much more than the purported inflation rate suggests. The cost of housing, utilities, and local taxes has certainly increased beyond inflation levels. And don’t even get me started on how much has gone up, crushing families who can least afford it.