Om det är osäkert vart Kina egentligen är på väg, så kan vi redan nu med lätthet konstatera att utvecklingen i USA rör sig i fel riktning. Välfärdsstaten USA växer sig nämligen allt större. CSMonitor:

Slightly over half of all Americans – 52.6 percent – now receive significant income from government programs, according to an analysis by Gary Shilling, an economist in Springfield, N.J. That’s up from 49.4 percent in 2000 and far above the 28.3 percent of Americans in 1950. If the trend continues, the percentage could rise within ten years to pass 55 percent, where it stood in 1980 on the eve of President’s Reagan’s move to scale back the size of government.

”This is right out of an Ayn Rand novel”, skriver de på Right Wing News. Tragiskt men sant.

Detta är förstås ingen gigantisk olyckshändelse eller tillfällighet. Det finns en ideologisk faktor här. Bakom expansionen av välfärdsstaten har vi, på sistone, framför allt Bushs ”medkännande konservatism” och de neokonservativas inflytande över adminsitrationens agenda.

C Bradley Thompson ger i sin artikel ”The Decline and Fall of American Conservatism” en bra analys som förklarar det vi har sett de senaste åren.

Here are some hard facts. Government spending has increased faster under George Bush and his Republican Congress than it did under Bill Clinton, and more people work for the federal government today than at any time since the end of the Cold War. During Bush’s first term, total government spending skyrocketed from $1.86 trillion to $2.48 trillion, an increase of 33 percent (almost $23,000 per household, the highest level since World War II). The federal budget grew by $616.4 billion during Bush’s first term in office. If post 9/11 defense spending is taken off the table, domestic spending has ballooned by 23 percent since Bush took office. When Bill Clinton left office in 2000, federal spending equaled 18.5 percent of the gross domestic product, but by the end of the first Bush administration, government outlays had increased to 20.3 percent of the GDP. The annualized growth rate of non-defense and non-homeland-security outlays has more than doubled from 2.1 percent under Clinton to 4.8 percent under Bush.

Så mycket för att George Bush skulle vara en företrädare för frihet och kapitalism. George Bush är en katastrof. Inte bara utrikespolitiskt utan även inrikespolitiskt.