Two other items worth noting:
Pete Peterson of The Blackstone Group offers this assessment of government priorities:
[F]ederal investment in nondefense R&D is getting crowded out by the ballooning cost of health care and retirement programs. Four decades ago these R&D expenditures were nearly 6 percent of the federal budget. Today they are less than 2 percent. During that period, spending on health-care programs like Medicare and Medicaid increased by more than 12 times as a percentage of GDP, whereas non-defense R&D spending fell by 60 percent. These benefits for seniors?largely Social Security and Medicare?threaten to devour the entire federal budget. And these programs, focusing on us older fogeys, are, alas, about the past and not the future.
Gordon Brown, Britain’s chancellor of the Exchequer (and Tony Blair’s heir apparent as Labour Prime Minister) avoids all discussion of the welfare state in offering praise for the American economy:
[T]he success of the American economic experience teaches us that the lifeblood of a market economy is the continuous injection of new competition.
It has been the hard work and enterprise of the American people, responding to the new opportunities brought by each successive wave of global economic change, that have been the foundation of American economic progress.
