Bush's legacy

I find it interesting that in many countries, the women have a lower retirement age than the men, which doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense considering that women generally tend to outlive men. Or maybe it's just a way to pay women less benefits with fewer working years, especially since many women have to take a few years off to raise children.

doctorj wrote: [quote=sprite]But it does seem to me that for many years, European countries were able focus to so much on the butter side of the curve because we focused on the guns side.

That's true. So...
1) The American public put up with this for decades because...?
2) When the Cold War ended, the US could withdraw from its post-WWII positions, generally disarm, and build the following social institutions with the money they saved: ... ?
Good questions. I don't know the answers, but I can give you my guesses.

1) The Cold War. I think a lot of people were afraid of the USSR, and honestly believed the spread of communism threatened the American way of life. (Whether those were realistic fears is debatable, but it doesn't really matter as long as people believed they were.) People who feel threatened will be in favor of military spending.

2) When the Federal income tax was established, some legislators proposed a 10% cap. But this was defeated because most doubted the tax rate would ever climb so high - in fact, they feared the cap would give the government an excuse to meet the ceiling. Without the cap, they believed the American public would never accept so high a tax rate. Little did they know.

My point is, by the time the Berlin Wall fell our high level of military spending had become normal. It supports lots of jobs, and even some towns' whole economies. Our budget has been like this all my life, and all my parents' lives. Something like that is hard to change, especially since so many of the ramifications are invisible.

We also have an ingrained cultural antipathy to large government-run social programs. We could cut the military budget in half, but I'm not sure Americans would want to spend the money on universal healthcare or childcare programs. I think more people would rather have lower taxes. Of course, this means a lot of people would spend their money foolishly, and have trouble down the road, but culturally we have tended to support a person's right to make bad choices and face the consequences thereof.

Of course, with the healthcare and social security crises nearly upon us, that may change soon. But whatever solutions we implement, I don't think they'll be as large-scale as the social systems in many European countries. Cultural preferences are difficult to change.