[Siegmund]

Some good points here, but the article is also full of clichés and unexamined assumptions. A few examples:

Yet passionate political engagement among millions of Americans puts many other countries to shame.

Sheer nonsense. Mob actions, typical of democracies everywhere - and much of it financed by wealthy opportunists - should not be confused for political engagement. There are no genuine ideas in American politics, just appetites to be manipulated.

Yet at the same time commercial channels such as HBO produce the best dramas, documentaries and comedies in the world.

His world must be very small. The depravity of of such popular programs as Six Feet Under and (yes, it's heresy to say this) The Sopranos is frequently taken as a sort of gold standard - showing only how gross and pandering a medium television really is. I'm not saying there's no entertainment value. But the best in the world? Not even close, in my view.

Its media boasts celebrity tabloids including People and the National Enquirer, yet the New Yorker and Harpers and Atlantic Monthly are examples of its magazines which invest in quality journalism that no publication in Britain can match.

Low level liberal dreck, all of it. The average news analysis in Le Monde or even Der Spiegel is far superior, even if it too reflects the prevailing politically correct mentality.

Incidentally, to say that no publication in Britain (England, I presume he means) can match these American publications shows only the low level of English journalism, whence American journalism was born, after all.

Most of the economic analysis is correct, but not this part:

Still the tax cuts go on. This week one of the main political debates in Washington has been about scrapping the 'estate tax' whereby those who inherit large amounts from their relatives will be taxed on it. This overwhelmingly affects the wealthy. The estate tax is already set so high ($4m) that only one in 200 estates pay any tax at all when they are inherited. Unlike the UK's inheritance tax, which affects more and more Britons as house prices increase, this is not a problem faced by Joe and Jennifer Public.

Yet the White House and many politicians, overwhelmingly Republican, want to get rid of it.

Think about it for a moment. The author assumes it's appropriate to tax money that has been saved by people upon their death. But that can't be right: it's not as though the money is being distributed to the poor, and even if it were, in such an atomistic society as the American one, the notion that such monies are not immediately squandered and that they benefit people in the long range is absurd. But the money is in fact going to pay the politicians, most of it through indirect channels; and what doesn't go there goes to support such adventures as the Iraqi debacle.

Giving money to the US government is worse than throwing it away. So at least let private citizens hang on to it.

Personally, I favor a corporativist or (national) socialist economic model as much more equitable and as a duty of government to provide for its people. But this old fashioned standard never took root in the US; as a result, the US is doomed to become a simalcrum of late Roman antiquity's infinitely rich and infinitely poor.

Originally Posted by Milesian

Interesting that when it comes to "Human Rights", immigration, race, etc they are keen to tell us that we are all equal and that equality is a good thing.

Yet when it comes to economic class then inequality the natural way of things, and further it is actually a good thing.

Brilliant.

I voted option #3. Nothing will change without massive external pressure, which is unlikely to arrive in our generation; or without massive and intelligent internal revolt, which is likely never to happen given the drugged condition of all but a handful of Americans. Even the spectre of 15 million illegal aliens rewarded with citizenship, or another devastating military gaffe, have done virtually nothing to arouse ordinary people to effective action.