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if you think about the volume of retail activity, it's obvious that the wealthy are not central players in the game. 30 years of neoliberal nonsense to the contrary has proven to be false.
but the underlying problem really--what enabled this goofball experiment in skewing the tax code, and much else, toward the wealthy---was the neoliberal "understanding" of the state. you know the drill, there's no need to repeat it. one effect of this was that it was ideologically impossible for the neoliberals to devise coherent patterns of action for the state beyond maintaining the patronage system that was built after world war 2 around what we laughingly call the "national security state."
so one improvement is coherent goals for state action: benchmarking, transparency in the doing: the capacity to make adjustments requires that they be made relative to something, some objective or objectives. this is a far more efficient use of the state than was treating it as an irrationality engine except when it came to funnelling vast sums of cash into high-tech military toys.
dismantle the national security state. this is not to say abandon military procurements etc---but take the state off a cold war footing. the right likes to talk about how the reagan period saw the end of the cold war--the myriad problems with the delusion that reagan policies "won" it aside, it's obvious that the situation changed across the early 1990s. it's time to adjust. that would free up far more money for other, more rational tasks. one thing that's been obvious since the vietnam period is that vertically organized militaries which rely on a radical extension of the doctrine of total war and which orient their procurement around these assumptions is entirely dysfunctional.
this means a loss of power for one of the central constituencies that supports the right--so be it.
the educational system is a wreck, but not because of teacher's unions and tenure--it is a wreck because control of it is tied to localities, which makes it an exact mirror of the american class system in terms of resources and impossible to treat as a system, and so impossible to reorient coherently. funding should originate with states, and should be flat across localities. create systems of magnet schools to use in a positive sense the specialities of particular faculties. gear the overall policy that shapes how education is done around realistic--and adaptable--profiles of the labor pool, which is what the system reproduces. at the level of content, i would prefer to see that conservative mythologies of history be eliminated entirely and critical thinking emphasized in the cirriculum--but that's perhaps a long-term objective, something that would be enabled by the reorienting of the system as a whole and the creation of something approaching the meritocracy that folk like to pretend we already have, when the fact is we have nothing like that. at all.
i shall now bow to guyy's wisdom and mightiness and communicate to myself in what i imagine sanskrit to be.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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