In 1800, you had to work, on average, one hour to obtain ten minutes of artificial light. Today, this same hour allows you to buy 300 days of light. In 1900, one kilowatt-hour of electricity cost one hour of work. This costs five minutes of our time now. Buying one cheeseburger in McDonald’s required 30 minutes of hard labor in 1950. This same sandwich now costs about three minutes of your life.
Earlier this week the Trump administration announced their proposed budget for 2018.
One of the cardinal rules of government accounting and rhetoric is to call any slowdown in the growth rate of government spending a “cut.” This gives the impression that less is being spent when more is being spent. It’s just that less is being spent than the government had planned on spending otherwise.
With the discussion over the Trump budget this week, there’s lots of talk of cuts, but it’s important to remember that there are absolutely no cuts whatsoever in the actual amount of money the government plans to spend.
It has long since become a doctrine of the modern American welfare state that the federal government must be the primary administrator of the nation’s so-called safety net. Any attempt to devolve the welfare state to the states is routinely treated as backward and reactionary.
